Album Review: Ordeals - Third Rail Prayer
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Black metal is, among a hundred other things, known for the atmosphere it crafts. Snowbound desolation. Fantastical vistas aflame with the quarrels of orc and elf. Furnace-hearths in the heart of hell. This one is a little different. I don’t know if it’s due to the piercing squeal of train wheels in some of the samples it uses or the burbling electronics of instrumentals “Aequanimitas” and “Compulsion”, or even the front cover artwork, but Ordeals speak to me of more urban environs; the annihilating sprawl of brutalist architecture, soulless grey alienation given form. Its riffs are the flutter of the human spirit against it, its percussion the barely suppressed rage against the soul-deadening oppression of it. There’s something dystopian here, as though the sounds of album reside hidden within a totalitarian forest of concrete, raging out, surrounded by tenement after tenement of dull flatness granted no more colour than what the lies of propagandist paraphernalia require.
It’s not all black metal, and the band do not define themselves purely as such – though I do fancy that there’s more of it in there than anything else. Happenstance can’t be discounted, fine, but... does anyone else hear the oily blackness of French maestro Mutiilation in the riffwork? Take “New False Prophet” from the lordly “Black Millenium” album; hear the vermicular, undulating guitar lines of it, and contrast them against the title track at 0.13 on this here Ordeals release. The resemblance speaks for itself. But beyond this, I also catch strains of a band that formerly I considered the summit of black metal: Inquisition. I haven’t wanted to listen to them ever since I learned of Dagon (vocalist and guitarist for Inquisition) having had severely serious legal issues involving images of children. Anything that can recreate the macabre splendour of that band and thus present an alternative, as Ordeals manage in the singing chords of “Scorn Ceremony”, Is to be welcomed with ravening hunger. Death metal is readily apparent, but for the most part it’s corrosive charms are present in the vocal performance. You see, once upon a time there was a band called “Kataklysm”. In their wisdom, they ushered forth their debut “Sorcery” unto the world, and lo! There was much rejoicing. In it, the efforts of a gentleman called Sylvain Houde reside. This is a very good thing, because Sylvain growls with the distilled fury of a Klan rally trying to work out who bought interracial pornography withthe joint credit card. The vocal work here likewise channels that recalcitrant, foaming rage into an absolute molotov of a showing.
The whole album is full of these dignified yet sorrowful melodies (“Throes” being one particularly salient example). There’s a horrible pressure to it, less the physical pressure exerted when the snare actually closes, than the mental pressure of knowing that the snare is closing and there existsnothing you can do to stop it. It feels bleak yet implacable, as if in the grim urgency of “Emerge” it has taken accurate stock of the inevitability of failure and chosen to proceed anyway.It’s a deeply complex piece of work, but one that builds and transitions intelligently, which helps counter the lack of coordination it could otherwise have suffered from. There’s a deliberate, considered attitude to the music, and while it has charms enough on a first playthrough it’s real strengths are only unlocked over multiple listens. I’m not wild about all of it’s decisions, true – for one thing, some riffs in, say, “Third Rail Prayer” and “Scorn Ceremony” do sound a bit similar to each other – but the odd blemish aside Ordeals overall present me with a prodigious display of power that I’ll be watching future developments of with rapt attention.
I’m too pathologically introverted to want to spend much time around other people, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean anything more than that I, personally, struggle to be accompanied for long. I think people are beautiful, numinous things. “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals”. I’m not the first to use in sincerity that which Hamlet said in cynical jest to highlight the depths of ennui he’d fallen to (Captain Picard beat me to the punch) but despite the endless variety of horrors we visit upon each other I will always maintain that humanity is a wondrous thing. I don’t know if that sense of this inner luminescence railing against the encroaching drudgery of repression is what the band were going for, the impotence of the struggle against overwhelming odds, the hopelessness of it, the urge to continue regardless – but it’s what they’ve captured nonetheless. Whatever the future holds, I hope only that the spark within them continues to burn for long years to come.
