Goldicot Culls The Week - IX

by Goldicot

Sun, 23 Mar 2025

Read in 4 minutes

Mortal hubris of 3, never to 6

weekly

I can never decide if I should write about the stuff I like, or the stuff that’s actually interesting. Thankfully it was easy this week – everything was both. The end of February brought the quality out in full force, with one-off victor Scimitar, Seidhr, and Light Dweller, double winners for stalwart bulwark Dark Descent with Sepulchral Curse and Grave Infestation, and an insane quadruple winner for the best label out there, I, Voidhanger. Only one survived the cull, but Sleep Paralysis, Venomous Echoes, and Ruinous Power (of Mitochondrion and Atemporal fame) are all very much worth a peep. Next week the struggle begins anew…

3

It’s not heavy anymore. It’s deep, way down below the depths, the crushing weight mounting up and away from belief. It’s not heard anymore. It’s felt, reverberating through the ground, a monolithic rumble, larger and louder than all you know, an all-encompassing dirge, conducted through your bones. Ritual Ascension sounds like total darkness – you can actually see your vision dim when playing – and it sounds like it’s been dark for a long, long time. Cavernous death-doom emanates through pitch black nothingness, but it doesn’t feel so much like you’re listening to it, as it feels like it’s listening to you, sending tectonic waves of tuneless vibration, through you, but only incidentally – you were just in the way. Profanation of the Adamic Covenant is even more extreme than my hyperbole. Funeral death metal.

2

There is melancholy in the shadow of the machine, a resignation to technology, a surrender to the dystopia, that brings a certain sense of calm, an acceptance of the replacement, of irrelevance, of disconnect – you learn to like being lonely. Saint Vengeur is found not there in the loom but in the street, frenzied and overwhelmed, fighting back against something, anything, rather than accept the inevitable. There are echoes of many familiar things here: cyber-gothic funerals for mankind, synth-drenched metropolises of decaying opulence and drone-illuminated neon architecture, but there is no comfort to be found in the recognition, Sex and Repression in Higher Society is a dizzying trip of vertigo and confusion, a look down from a paralyzing height to a thriving urban mass of human circuitry, uncomprehending. This is some kind of industrial synthwave, never repetitious and ever changing, sometimes rising in aggression to appear like a digital simulacrum of metal, distorted by the render and gone before apprehension. There is never a focal point, only oscillation around and away, even the vocals manifest as the deathbed taunts of a superior lifeform, interrupting desperate attempts to reap the whirlwind. This blackened occult tech takes place in the same neon cities that inspired songs of mortal sunset, yet Saint Vengeur alone captures the confusion in the hostility of your whole world against you. 

1

Matt Stephens is my zeitgeist. Project after project of overflowing originality, Stephens and his label Putrefactive are the true definition of experimentation, each new volley a defiance of a different norm, an exploration of a new vector, a new creation from new clay. Most vexing is Stephens’ choice of genric vessel, many of his finest moments paradoxically appearing in metal’s worst genre, goregrind – although 2025 had, so far, been an apparent sabbatical from the medical cacophony, instead focusing these mad sciences on classical chamber music (Tantric Bile) and extreme dissonant black metal (Christian Necromancy). The reprieve is over, Effluence has returned in fearsome array, and this time the dripping maw has many teeth. The eighty-eight keys of the piano are transformed into frequential weaponry, sometimes all at once in lashing cascades of jarring chromaticism, sometimes slowly in hideous clawing lengthwise across the string, sometimes in pure percussive black MIDI-esque hammerblow, but most often in fist-clenched distorted heavy riff wrench. There are no guitars, and their absence is not felt, blindingly bright is the light of their replacement on Pianistic Dismemberment, yet another triumph for Matt Stephens, he who drinks deep from many wells and isn’t getting any less thirsty.