EP Review: Nightmarer - Hell Interface
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Nightmarer. Theirs is a contorted call; skeins birthed in blackness and death intertwined and wound, darting like startled rats in all directions. The maps had said “here be dragons” – and their roars sound closer now, ember-lunged bellows, smoke studded with cinders. Desperate attempts to fence the unknowable into parameters, as though the infinite exists by your consent. Mithridation salves the worst of the toxins but there’s no making this comfortable. Languorous menace! Arcing throughout unglimpsed yet known to you, near and far, no running from it. Skittering undefined at the furthest tip of the mind’s eye that you know it to be there, yet cannot in full reckon with its form. The twinkle of stardust beams within the atoms of all of us; by such light is the force before you felt, unseen yet revealed as a hateful miasma pervasive and inescapable, sailing along the blood thrumming thick and dark in the halls of your veins.
4 psalms.
They drink the light in and excrete it as hovering shade; the light might yet peer down from miles on high yet you would know not for the writhing tomb of boiling shadow that coats the world entire.
Extinction Burst.
Shame Spiral.
Crawl of Time.
Hell Interface.
Their forms indistinct, dark within dark, too much of one with it to stand in relief against it. It’s felt, not beheld, scouring torrents, a storm a thousand leagues below the waves, blinded you’d feel the meat slough from your bones. Glass edged squall; swarm of phantoms, frayed spectral robes honed to scalpel edges, oncoming, rushing, a riptide of knives. Yet there’s a grace to it; the onslaught once considered discordant, yet though this be madness, yet there is method in it. A concordance in slaughter, amidst the chaos a unity, an order, an admiration due to the subtle artistry of desolation. Flinching from the shrill sting of sniping swipes from above as would cattle from the brand. The ways and means convulse and morph, a deluge in which to drown then scalpel-slight, whisper thin as new ice on stilled pools, yet iron hard, implacable, effortless passenger through the softness of flesh. Resist not. No armour yet pulled from the anvil will stay the advance, no blade drawn from human forge so stalwart as to turn it aside. Earthen bastion no defence; the foe digs deeper than you have power to tunnel. It will part the continents to reach you, swim channels aeons in width that light would sputter and fade in traversing.
Heavy, it presses down, pitiless, remorseless, your knees were meant for kneeling, thine spine wasted but for bowing. Speed is its ally, yet it counts also the slow death amongst its allegiances. Great black walls drawing close, stone noose, the vertebrae of the earth a mountain range drawn taut about your throat. A throttling swamp of hateful intent underfoot, slitting gales in the scored heavens above, you penned in-between, a Gordian knot of fast, slow, stratospheric or subterranean torments from unseen assailants your only company.
4 psalms.
The end draws nigh quickly, mercy of sorts on a landscape of desiccated corpses, papyrus rags of skin snagged on browned ribs. What remains alive cowers before it as a possible portent of crueller works to come; so many graves to be dug in dead earth, who shall claw more into the wastes should the nightmare resume to cull what little clings on? Imaginations beyond the bounds of yours doubtless brood on fresh atrocities as we speak. Hell Interfaced, the future glowers ever bleaker, scant steps ahead lie naught but promises of endless pain, endless misery, and endless suffering.
Nightmarer. Theirs is a contorted call.
Maybe that’s all a bit abstract for a metal review. But sometimes it feels more appropriate to discuss albums less in terms of the specifics of individual riffs or drum fills (though I will say that the verse riff in the title track is one of my favourites this year so far) and more in terms of how they feel. In Nightmarer’s case that feeling is one of intense, isolating blackness. I think it presents a definite step forward from “Deformity Adrift” (their last album), retaining all of the nauseating heaviness while increasing the sinister atmospherics to produce something that has me clamouring for a future full-length. There’s no serious drawbacks. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but then, what is? It’s an easy recommendation for those of you who need to feel maximally miserable within twenty minutes, so if you’re on a tight schedule and you just can’t abide how upbeat you’re feeling, grab it the second it releases.
