Moloch, Depressive Black Metal Plague, Acephale Winter Productions, cassette AWP005 (2013)
Signing off at less than 20 minutes in length, this EP could easily be missed in a body of work totalling well over 90 releases. The very stark black-and-white packaging with its neo-primitive minimal style gives some indication of the raw, abrasive, no-nonsense music residing within. And this really is raw depressive black metal, very slack and disheartening music with a dirge-like feel, stumbling percussion and a general air of apathy . So apathetic is it that the Moloch man couldn’t be bothered to give the four tracks on offer proper titles so they’re just called “Plague I” all the way to “Plague IV” – well, at least he cared enough to use Roman numerals from 1 to 4.
First track lumbers by with torpid drumming and squally noise guitar, over which a voice harangues away in Ukrainian or Russian. The song becomes buzzier as it progresses and the atmosphere becomes delirious before it all fades away. Track 2 has an even more distorted and harsh texture and the song’s background ambience is dark and menacing. The singing is more anguished and melodramatic. The drums seem to be buried deep in a shaft somewhere as the cymbals are only just audible and the beat of the bass drum is probably the only other part of the percussion we can hear. Extremely grim and with a sound that rips paint off walls in long strips, this song could rob listeners of the will to endure. Carry on we do though with Track 3, piling on the distress with wailing and begging against a background of droning, churning guitar and drums that drunkenly veer all over the joint.
The final track seems a more streamlined and free-form piece with gritty droning guitar churning away and the drums following their own piper in contrast to the steady drone feast. Everything goes along without much change until it all deflates and dies away.
The atmosphere on this brief recording is very draining, almost vampiric: as soon as the first bars of “Plague I” start, you feel unmotivated to do anything other than just lying flat on your face while the EP plays. The singing is quite impressive in its desperation and lack of hope though in the second and third tracks it veers dangerously close to melodramatic excess. The guitars are limited to a constant raw ‘n’ sore bleeding noise drone in all tracks, allowing the drums to wander where they will: this gives the music a very loose, rough-hewn improvisatory style. Any minute now the music might soar off on a delirious tangent of hypnotic immersive psychedelic black metal mayhem – I sort of hoped it would. Above all though is the dejected and hopeless emotion that hangs over the entire recording, a feeling that life is so bad and so painful, it just isn’t worth living any more.
Contact: Acephale Winter Productions