Album Review: Voidthrone - Dreaming Rat
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Have you ever wondered what might happen if you dropped a fistful of acid and watched Event Horizon? If so, then Voidthrone are here to let you know. Riffs are instrumental renditions of a mass of misfiring neurons, seizing, jittering, unpredictable. Occasionally content to lapse into a sullen quiescence only to pounce with rabid abandon in any direction the compass allows for and some it probably doesn’t. Genre-wise it’s somewhere in the fuzzy midground between black and death metal, or at least the more dissonant fringes of them - as much Deathspell Omega as it is the more fevered “The Locust” inspired chunks of Cattle Decapitation’s back catalogue; splashes of some tormented version of Artificial Brain in places, and the more opaque entries in Mayhem’s own career perhaps - Grand Declaration of War or Ordo Ad Chao. There’s a level of panicked whimsy to it as well. It bounces into a jovial polka sandwiched between blast beat avalanches on “Surfing the Abyss” – you may as well chuckle in the face of the impending heat death of the universe I suppose, and besides – a level of lighthearted lunacy should probably be expected of any band that titles a song “Morbid Seagull”.
Yet none of the chaos matters if, at it’s core, it’s just chaos with no real songwriting going on. So as ever the question comes down to: is it any good? Yes, in a word. It’s excellently performed, rather unapproachable (in a good way), and unapologetically itself in all its bewildering resplendence. And it has virtues in abundance besides; I love the bass for one thing – out here doing it’s own thing instead of just humming along an imitation of the guitars, springing out to drop a fill or a melody line of it’s own, often leading the riff while the guitars paint a squalling landscape behind it. There’s a psychotic break of a vocal performance, half a plethora of harsh vocal styles and half a collection of mad laughter, demented gibbering and agonised howling – even if some of it comes over less as distressingly mad and more just a little bit annoying, especially this “ninininininini” noise that gets made on “Ren Omega”, and “The Dying Squid” which opens with a guest performance from Kermit coming home midway through an existential crisis to find that Mrs Piggy has been made into a sandwich. There’s moments throughout - “Worm Spiral” for example - where a diseased variety of tunefulness breaks through and counterpoints how otherwise atonal the album is, and while there is a sort of predictability going on insofar as the album being reliably batshit insane, things like a springy jaw harp and tribal drum breaks prove the band is never short on ideas.
Voidthrone haven’t released an album here so much as an attack of auditory night terrors, but at the risk of overstating the case there is restraint of a sort going on. We’re at dangerous levels of mental infirmity, yes, but we’ve yet to become as wholly detached from reality as a band like Effluence might be. The band isn’t constantly at full throttle, and tracks like “Homeless Animal” are happy to explore their neuroticism at more mid paced tempos. There’s even moments dotted about where the medication kicks in and the band approaches something like stability – flickers of conventional deathgrind or slam popping out to say hello on tracks like “Bergen” as well as a handful of nimble, much-appreciated shredfest solos. If I feel as though the band’s restless experimentation does sometimes impede the songs in forming an arc – building up to things, crescendos, resolving musical motifs, etc – it does for sure prevent them ever being boring. There is always something going on, a burst of unhinged laughter, proggy bass noodling, the band deciding to channel their inner Discordance Axis with a sudden grind spree, or any number of other twists on the formula the band are so liberal with.
I mean this as a compliment, but this album sounds like a bus full of clowns getting teleported into hell. And with that there’s the obvious point that this is an acquired taste, but then, so much of the most interesting stuff is. It’s a testament to what can be accomplished if you take all the wrong drugs, and for that reason alone you should sample the bad trip that Voidthrone are sending us all on.
