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Deathspell Omega: Paracletus
06/01/11 || Khlysty
Y’know, it had to happen, sooner or later. Deathspell Omega (from here on to be called DsO) just had to make a prog rock record. See, if one regarded carefully the band’s/collective’s orbit, prog rock was an inevitable point for them to reach, after displaying disquieting signs of pissing all over black metal’s traditional posits and creating a sound that, while using black metal sound as a starting point, expanded into totally unexplored musical universes of dissonance, experimentation, sickly ambiance, death metal brutality and prog rock almost-but-not-exactly pretensions.
“Paracletus” is supposed to be the third and final part of a trilogy that started in 2004 with the completely left-brained “Si Monumentum Requires Circumspice” and continued in 2007 with the exceedingly dissonant and hectic “Fas – Ite Maledicti In Ignem Æternum”, and concerns God, Devil and the place Man has between these two driving ethical forces. In between, the band managed to produce two exceptional E.P.s, the hyper-dense –musically as well as conceptually- “Kénôse” and the brilliant “Chaining The Katechon”. All of these recordings showed that, even if one doesn’t care about the band’s philosophically inclined approach towards Satanism (and I must say that, sometimes, the exceedingly dense text that’s used as lyrics had me perplexed and searching my books for the proper references, so as to be able to interpret their meaning), one cannot but be left openmouthed and in awe of the technicality, experimentalism and pure genius the guys at DsO displayed with their music.
Well, this time around, DsO goes one step further, creating record that –and I’m betting my ass here- in a few years’ time will be considered as a classic and a point of reference for EVERYfuckingTHING black metal. Compositionally speaking “Paracletus” has more in common with Pink Floyd’s or King Crimson’s most dark and creepy moments than with, say, anything that’s considered as black metal today. The band simultaneously combines, in a way that really makes it really hard for me to describe, the most ferocious elements of black metal with a technicality and eye for detail that would make Yes of Robert Fripp blush in shame. Even when the drummer blasts away, the guitars are weaving a melodious/dissonant combination of shreds, arpeggios, single-note runs and everything in between. What’s more surprising, though, is how controlled and slow “Paracletus” sounds, especially when compared with the wall-to-wall blasting of “Fas…”.
There’s a lot of jarring tempo and time signature changes all along each and every song contained here, but everything seems totally calculated and painstakingly composed and performed, reminding me of some of the more interesting strains of death metal, while the band is not averse to some –ulp!- good ole four-to-the-floor rawk, at least until the chaotic blasting holds reign supreme, as it happens during the sickly “Have You Beheld The Fevers?”. Another thing that I enjoy pretty much in “Paracletus” is its inherent compactness: nothing lasts more than it should, song-lengths ranging from two to seven minutes max and never managing to enter the realms of redundancy. The production is phucking phenomenal: even at the densest moments, there’s clarity, separation and a hefty bottom-end (and, joy of joys, AUDIBLE BASS!!!), that gives the songs so much presence and character so that they seem ready to jump outta the speakers and start slashing blindly all around. The vocals consist of the usual raspy howl, but, this time around, we have detours into spoken word delivery and –very rarely- a sense of simple melodicism.
Bottom line? Yeah, bottom line is that DsO, with “Paracletus” stop being an underground phenomenon and become one of the most important extreme music bands of the 21st century. Yeah, sometimes they might seem overblown and pretentious; so fucking what? They have every fucking right to be. Their music is so great, so original, so detailed and so subtle as to be outside genre restrictions and dogmas. DsO is a force of change into the basically stagnant pool of black metal, a reformist band that shows the path towards a gloriously sick and impossibly great future for anyone daring enough to follow them. Masterpiece? Nah, just another facet of the greatest band working today in the field of “metal”.
- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Norma Evangelium Diavoli
- Website: www.noevdia.com
- Band
- No certain or conclusive information about DsO’s members available
- Tracklist
- 01. Epiklesis I
- 02. Wings of predation
- 03. Abscission
- 04. Dearth
- 05. Phosphene
- 06. Epiklesis II
- 07. Malconfort
- 08. Have you beheld the fevers?
- 09. Devouring fanine
- 10. Apokatastasis pantôn
