ESOCTRILIHUM "The Telluric Ashes of the O Vrth Immemorial Gods"

ESOCTRILIHUM

"The Telluric Ashes of the O Vrth Immemorial Gods"

With a name like ESOCTRILIHUM and an album title like this, it has to be an I, Voidhanger release. The label specializes in utterly bizarre and usually epic "outsider" metal designed to be enjoyed by a select few. Usually their releases are either transcendentally brilliant or abhorrently unlistenable, as well as being loaded with pretentious "hermetic" wisdom. What of our boys ESOCTRILIHUM? What part of this spectrum do they inhabit?

We get a little bit of everything here. The core foundation of the sound is the extremity of black and death metal, but it's mixed with exotic instrumentation and mind warping time changes. The earlier part of the album is disorienting to say the least and full of cosmic weirdness. This is virtually a double album we are dealing with and the excessive length creates a feeling of exhaustion in the listener. There are no easy comparisons but here are some names I can throw at you...ORANSSI PAZUZU, NOCTURNUS, ABSU, BLUT AUS NORD, DEATHSPELL OMEGA. And that's just a beginning...

Around the half way point,which is the song "Aborted Sun", some of the weirdness settles down a bit and the tunes become a bit more straightforward and brutal. "Black Hole Entrance" and "Black Hole Exit" are both scourging examples of avant-garde death and black metal. The last song "Torment of Death" is nine and a half minutes that begins with a volcanic eruption but ends in an exploration of peculiar chords.

The album, including the overbearing "gnostic" lyrics that sound 90% made up by some teenage chaos wizard who's just discovered Clark Ashton Smith, wound up tiring me out. Just too much to digest. Yet it is a very challenging work and certainly has moments of both brutality and brilliance. A unique experience that is hard to describe easily and thus, embodying everything I, Voidhanger Records stands for.

I, VOIDHANGER RECORDS

ESOCTRILIHUM at Encyclopedia Metallum