Goldicot Culls The Week - XI

by Goldicot

Wed, 9 Apr 2025

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Something for nobody

weekly

Comparisons are a privilege. You should only get to make them after a high-quality assessment of the thing itself. What is it? What is it trying to do? Does it do it? These are just some of what constitutes the bare minimum before the invocation of other, similar efforts, can be made. Of course, we’re all deeply unoriginal people, to the extent that some thinkers deny free will based on aesthetic unoriginality, you can only think the thoughts you have, so on and so forth. It’s an acceptable crutch and you can’t really blame anyone for it. But something is lost in the immediate leap to “this is like that other thing” or “this goes in that box with the rest.” You can’t take the jungle out of the monkey, so watch which jungle you put it in, lest you lose the chance to know what kind of monkey it really is. Okay, fine, yes, I broke my no-name-dropping rule again. How could you tell?

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Finally. Kerberos bears an unfair curse of familiarity, that of being the first to successfully tread a well-trod yet failure-ridden path. There are so many symphonic death metal groups, and almost all of them are just mediocre death metal with extra steps and accessorized baubles. Kerberos is not one of them. Kerberos is better. So much better, in fact, that Apostle to the Malevolent almost sounds like two albums at once; one of sturdy technical death metal alternating groove and intricacy, matching stalwarts like Beyond Creation with ease, and another of baroque symphonic operatic harpsichordal flautal madness. At all moments, these two sides play together in perfect unison, in a frankly wonderful incessant wash of colorful metal and bone-breaking classical. And so I return to my lament – there should be so much in this vibrant vein, instead it’s mostly a graveyard of dead hopefuls. Kerberos, though, now that is what this should be, and I praise Kerberos  for being of the few to try, and all the more to succeed. 

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There’s an inherent speciesism to environmental and wildlife preservation efforts. We tend to want to save the cute ones, like seals, and eradicate the ugly ones, like mosquitoes. Once aware of the cognitive bias, work backwards to the root: decomposition, decay and rot are just as beautiful as growth, bloom, and birth. Further down: a virus is more impressive than a butterfly, a predator more glorious than a bed of flowers. Now take it full circle: Bidirna Dhamani - Ojash. Two ends join, intertwine, strangle, and separate. Death-doom à la Morbid Angel and ritualistic folk dance the wheel with primitive clarity and shadowed veneration. Which is darker, the calm or the storm?

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The correct answer is black metal, but my own personal answer is that funeral doom is the most interesting metal subgenre. In the beginning, a bunch of weirdos across the world independently slowed death metal to an unprecedented crawl, united only in extremity. In the decades since it has settled into an uncanny harmony of shared vision, an uneasy equilibrium borne from common endoxa, of despondency and futility, a refining process and a grieving process alike. Life gets simpler as you die. What once was totally overwhelming, a stark, bleak alienation, a perfect isolation, is pared down to the core, a requiem for all feeling. Déhà is a preservation and idealization, both of the deeply personal and deeply human side of funeral doom and of the authentically weird and original spirit. The former is like the mountaineer’s trap, persevering to the utmost peak, yet failing to leave enough strength for the travel back down, and dying, claimed by the half-conquered mountain. Nethermost & Absolute Comfort is an arduous expanse, building up and crumbling down, a perfect realization of struggle, coda for every failure and denouement for every success. Atmospheres wavering between synthesizer and strings also waver between relief and despair, before crashing backward and downward into crushing doom, pockmarked with uncertain, blues guitar questioning, in a brutal cycle of attempt, reattempt, and further descent. And then the latter – that weird and original spirit – is Déhà’s voice, wrenched outward from the soul in many tortured fashions, sometimes resembling the resigned liturgy of a singing monk, accepting a dismal fate through sonorous hymn, but in reality the wailing and gnashing of a trapped and wounded beast, snarling through bared and broken teeth cries of hatred and pain, screams from lungs filling up with blood and from throat scarred and ripped open. And sometimes, both – alternating, in the same verse, a coexistence of impossible extremes: serenity in pain, peace in death.