Necro Deathmort are back. Following up the amazing ‘music of bleak origin’, the duo of AJ Cookson and Matthew Rozeik have delved even further into the dark recesses of the mind to craft an album that fizzes with ambition and intelligence. As on the previous album where we noted the artwork stood as the perfect depiction of the music, so the packaging here is an apt metaphor for the contents. Almost entirely black, dim pictures of vast star-fields are barely discernible through the murk, and astronauts drift in the immense arena of space, driven mad by isolation and claustrophobia – if one was to take this image as the starting point and consider the record to be the documentation of the continuing drift into insanity and solipsism, then that should give you some idea of the dark, occasionally terrifying territories you’ll be exploring. Forget Prometheus, this is truly a quest into the unknown reaches of space and Necro Deathmort rarely flinch from showing the horrors that lurk in the shadows.
‘The colonial script’ is arguably a tighter, more focused record than its sprawling predecessor. Opening track ‘imperial’ raises itself from a morass of overloaded electronica, the ever-present throbbing bass building whilst metallic sounds swirl overhead, finally collapsing in on themselves to reform as a complex industrial beat. Think NIN’s ‘Ghosts’ project remixed by Skinny Puppy and cross-pollinated with DNA from ‘further down the spiral’ and you’re in the right ballpark – this is truly the music of horror movies stripped of the imagination-murdering imagery and set loose on your naked nerve-endings and as the beat hammers into your subconscious so the unnerving sound effects tear your sense of well-being to shreds. ‘Led to the water’ introduces the guitars in almighty banks, droning across a somnambulant beat and providing an apt, metallic backdrop for the deathly screams unleashed over the top. It’s metal… well, sort of… or industrial… or drone… it’s hard to say, but what is undisputable is the sheer heaviness of the music being created, it’s closest living relative being the deadly gravitas of Godflesh or the repetitive, hysteria inducing unpleasantness of The Swans clothed in a psychedelic ambience that swirls and clouds the vision, inducing discomfort and, eventually, panic as the light fades. ‘Endless vertex’ finally lets up on the tension, the music expansive, sounds and ideas phasing in and out of the mix, although the guitar riffs, when they appear, are still multi-layered beasts that pummel and grind into you, slowly wearing you down until all that’s left is a shattered pulp quivering on the floor. It is in this state that you have to endure ‘wretched hag’, a terminally dark, atmospheric piece that builds over five harrowing minutes, all echoing percussion and seething electronics, to the terrifying final release of ‘Arrows’ (featuring Eliza Gregory on guest vocals). Despite its atonal guitars and bass-laden percussive assault, it’s actually a relief to finally grind up against an aural assault you can understand, the slick oily tension of the preceding five minutes having proven to be all but unbearable.
We’re halfway into our journey. The tunnel we’ve passed through to get here is slick and slimy with the blood of the fallen and to turn back now seems too much to bear, the tormented screams of ‘arrows’ now in the distance behind us. Moving into the dubbed-out, semi-bliss of ‘Shadows of reflections of ghosts past’ we are able to take stock of our situation and relax in music that is laden with tension and yet somehow filled with a sense of bliss; we may not be safe, not yet, but we are at least temporarily out of danger. It’s an oasis of calm, a brief respite that slowly plunges back into the darkness, the ambience distorting and mutating the further into the track we explore and then it’s ‘theme from escape’, an exercise in fraught tension building that crawls into your subconscious for the first minute and then lodges there, screaming and spitting, bristling with barely contained rage whilst you shake and sweat, unhinged by the ferocity of the assault only for it all to grind to a halt for the distinctly bizarre ‘Starbeast’. With the guitars briefly confined the sense of terror should abate, except the oddball percussive idiosyncrasies of ‘Starbeast’ merely replace the fear of the seen with the nausea-inducing terror of the unseen (or unheard) lurking, hunting, slithering through the darkness, always near and always impossible to locate. Even final track ‘Insecto !’ offers no answers, rather it leaves you floating, unhinged, unnerved and lost in the pitiless vacuum of space. This journey has no resolution, no neat answers, just the screaming horror of drifting until the oxygen runs out and a slow, choking death in the frozen nothingness of space. Huge guitars topple down upon you whilst the echoing screams pursue you to the bitter end and then the album ends and you can return to some shredded vestige of normality, convinced only of the fact that, for all its horrendousness, it is a journey you want to undertake again and again.
When Necro Deathmort released ‘music of bleak origin’ we named it one of the ten records of the year; that this expands and improves upon its forebear in almost every way is mind-boggling and yet true. This is deep, dark, claustrophobic and utterly engrossing and thus an essential purchase in every sense.
Like what you hear? Head on over to Bandcamp and get a hold of this amazing record.
