Caïna, Setter of Unseen Snares, Broken Limbs Recordings, 12″ vinyl BLR037 (2015)
For a Caïna album, “Setter of Unseen Snares” is short yet its musical and lyrical range seems much more vast than its full-length predecessors. Granted, those earlier recordings happen to be personal and originally were Caïna founder Andrew Curtis-Bignell’s way of dealing with the demons in his life; now his emphasis is on humanity’s failings and future prospects, and his despair at what may lie ahead.
The spoken-word introduction is lifted from “The Long Bright Dark” episode of the TV show “True Detective” in which actor Matthew McConnaughey’s character Rustin Cohle voices his pessimistic belief that having consciousness and self-awareness has damned human beings by fooling them into thinking that they and only they matter, that humans can and should be the masters over Earth and all its systems, that there are no limits to what humans can and should do, and as a result this delusion has led humanity down a path at the end of which Earth itself will be destroyed. Over the next several songs which travel through the most acid of black metal, the darkest industrial and the bleakest post-metal music territories, Caïna roar through and tear apart the institutions of society that have blinded us and driven us to our collective doom: institutional religion, hierarchies in which a few are a self-interested elite and the rest of us slaves, and all the other systems and networks that support this arrangement.
Three songs, “I Am the Flail of the Lord”, “Setter of Unseen Snares” and “Vowbound” form a natural trio exploring the relationship between God and humans, and the trap that people fall into when they give their loyalty to an abstraction manipulated by their leaders to enforce subservience. These are acerbic pieces of sheer ferocity and despair as Curtis-Bignell and company (guest vocalists appear on these and two other tracks on the album) detail how we became enslaved to systems and concepts of our devising.
The fury flows into “Applicant / Supplicant”, a darker yet also very melodic song than the previous three. The singing hardly flags either in intense emotion. Unexpected keyboard-based sparkling ambient effects bring dark melancholy bordering on longing and deep sadness. This track is significant as at this point humanity attempts to break away from centuries of mind-programming and to save itself.
“Orphan” is a mini-movie soundtrack in itself with many twists and turns, each more surprising than the last, and incorporating dark nihilistic atmosphere, high drama and anguish, and at least two vocalists; and all of these elements, as different as they can be from one another, all linking seamlessly, threaded with the passion of despair and anger that fires everything from start to finish. In this long piece, everything that comes before meets its ultimate judgement and the consequences that follow. Whether humanity survives and what its legacy will be to any who come in its wake is resolved here. The music at this point is a mix of desperation, bleakness and incredible sadness, yet deep in its layers there is something heroic and hopeful, as if in being cursed with self-conscious awareness, we finally realised the awesome responsibility that this bestowed on us, the potential for glory that could have accrued if we had used it wisely, and the possibility that even if our idiocy damns us, future intelligent species might see where we’ve gone and use our example as a warning to their own kind.
With “Setter of Unseen Snares”, Caïna have produced a highly accomplished recording which with the passage of time might be regarded as a classic of black metal fusion. There is deep pessimism, from which high emotion and desperation arise and help to power the music’s urgency and energy. The album’s production is faultless with a full and strong sound, and the guest vocalists perform with unshakeable belief in the album’s misanthropic premise.