Album Review: This Gift Is A Curse - Heir
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Six years on from the release of their third full-length, A Throne of Ash, Swedish blackened sludge misanthropists This Gift Is a Curse unleash their latest slab of bile-soaked venom, in the form of the succinctly titled: Heir.
The album boasts a lengthy, sixty-six-minute run-time and features ten songs of dark, cosmic desolation, wrapped up in some of the rawest black metal you’ll hear this year. Screeching guitars and blasting drums only tell half the story of Heir as, at any time, the track can fire off in a multitude of directions.
Opener Kingdom’s vortex of heavy triplets switches to a multi-voiced, melodic bridge, big and bombastic, before finding its hatred again; Death Maker is fast and furious, with an incessant drum kick and howling vocals, accompanying the grimmest of riffs. Yet for all its low-fi rasping, it conveys a wide and symphonic aspect, allowing space enough to let the song breath.
Seers of No Light is built around a hefty, doomy chug with massive, intersecting waves of intensity fighting for dominance; Vow Sayer is out and out evil in its rampaging, unflinching, charge.
Cosmic Voice has an uneasy ambience throughout its opening third, swelling through infectious drums and heavy keys to a slow burn of a tune, invoking the feel of galaxies colliding in the depths of the universe, and sounding like the sort of thing Mithras would be jealous of.
In among this is the ambient interlude of Passing, a short, unsettling piece that would not have been out of place on 1349’s Revelation of the Black Flame album.
Heavily contributing to Heir’s lengthy run-time are the four, near-ten-minute composition that pepper the track list. No Sun, No Moon blends the raw and cosmic; rasps and chants narrate this one, leading to a conclusion that repeats the title ad infinitum. Old Space, shorn of any airs or graces, is an exploration of the use of repetition, with a riff cycling endlessly growing in intensity each time.
Void Bringer has some of Heir’s dirtiest riffing, but blends them with a post metal interlude, as though stepping into the eye of a storm; Ascension brings the album to a conclusion with, unexpectedly, a classic metal riff and some choppy guitar work.
Patrik Andersson and David Deravian’s guitars are afforded the space to weave their magic by the platform afforded to them by the rhythm section of Lars Gunnarsson and drummer Christian Augustin, with Jonas A. Holmberg’s varied vocals adding colour to the record.
Listening to Heirs is an unsettling experience, one that seems to contain a stark warning for humanity. While most black metal releases venerate Satan and the demons of Pandemonium, This Gift Is a Curse seem to be pre-empting the arrival of some Lovecraftian beings from the deepest, darkest reaches of the void.
While some black metal releases are short, shock and awe, campaigns, Heirs is a full-on war of attrition, exploring its ideas in the fullest way possible.
Exhausting, at times, but constantly exhilarating.
Be the first to comment