Posts Tagged ‘esoteric’
Album of the day: Esoteric – Paragon of Dissonance
Posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Lovingly pinched from Metal Review: Funeral doom is, in most appreciable ways, a niche within a niche. Forcing the listener to bear witness to a cripplingly slow march to oblivion is not, it must be said, the easiest way to win friends and influence people. Nevertheless, for those of us slavering pursuers of the deepest slow and darkest doom, the UK’s Esoteric has been churning out psychedelic funeral doom / death metal of unmatchable brilliance for nearly two decades.
While the band is still a fiercely psychedelic trip through and through, with most of the songs summoning a towering groove to sink into and then ride out to its furthest possible limit and beyond (see Cipher in particular), sixth album Paragon Of Dissonance is undisputedly beautiful in a way that Esoteric has never before embraced so fully. Though this particular writer finds it difficult to over-enthuse about Esoteric, Paragon Of Dissonance just might be the band’s finest album yet, and easily stands as one of the most monstrously satisfying albums of the year.
Although the band has undergone subtle shifts between each album, the contours of Paragon Of Dissonance suggest that Esoteric’s career to date can be segmented rather neatly into two-album epochs. Epistemological Despondency and The Pernicious Enigma presented the band at its most hostile and nihilistic, capturing the sprawling corrosion of Disembowelment as it disintegrated into shimmering waves of disorienting noise.
The two single-disc albums, Metamorphogenesis and Subconscious Dissolution into the Continuum, pulled back ever-so-slightly on the suffocating weight of earlier efforts in order to make room for a bubbling undercurrent of increasingly woozy psychedelia. The most recent pair of albums, 2008’s The Maniacal Vale and the current Paragon Of Dissonance, has reverted to painting on a more expansive canvas, but with a completely cleaned-up production that is no less crushing for its occasional serenity.
Thus, Esoteric circa 2011 is less about the inescapable, gnawing horror of the band’s early work, and more about the glimmering seduction of willingly submitting to a beauty that conceals unsounded depths of malevolence.
Continue reading: Review of Esoteric – Paragon of Dissonance | Metal Review.
Tags: Album of the day, Dan Obstkrieg, doom, Epistemological Despondency, esoteric, funeral doom, Metal Review, Paragon Of Dissonance, Season of Mist, The Pernicious Enigma
Posted in 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended | No Comments »
Los Angeles Music – West Coast Sound: The Five Slowest Metal Bands
Posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011
The words “heavy metal” to most people conjure up visions of blazing-fast guitars, rapid double-bass drumming, and whiplash-inducing headbanging. The bands below, however, are the antithesis. In fact, there’s a growing substrata of groups that are defying metal stereotypes, slowing their music to a molasses pace, incorporating slow-motion riffs, and ...read more
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