Goldicot Culls The Week - XII

by Goldicot

Sun, 27 Apr 2025

Read in 6 minutes

My life begins at midnight twelve

weekly

Time flies when you’re having fun. Luckily, none of these albums are about having fun. Put a halt to the inexorable approach of future and inevitable death with three works of pure hostility. You can always bear the pain for just a moment longer, for you’ve already borne it all this time thus far. No, I’m not three weeks late with this article. Why do you ask?

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What really sets doom apart from all other noise is the act of deliberation. To deliberate upon a note, to refuse distraction, to sustain something definite, selected among alternatives. There is power bestowed by this act, a great duality – the specificity of the chosen, and the rejection of everything else: you will behold this and nothing else. Doom is really a beast of its own when properly considered, while other slow genres also demand patience, attention, and focus, only doom is resolute and commanding – you will behold this and nothing else. Which brings us to Rothadás, a death metal band. Yes, it’s true, I spent that entire rumination on doom to introduce a band that is not, in fact, doom metal. If my words are true, death-doom is not so much a description of a genre as it is laudatory praise of accomplished death metal, death that is totally in control of its power, such that it rules over you – deliberately. That is precisely what this is, death metal of monolithic heft and weight, like the dragging of massive stones into place, towering over your scattered wishes and wants, dominating the horizon and shadowing all else – you will behold this and nothing else.

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Somewhere in the detritus of a dying web there is an old Cosmo Lee article throwing shade at limp-wristed tremulous black metal for its weakness, by evermore brazen inversions of the good and proper, they become calcified in dispassion, wasting away. That’s my twisted and repurposed recollection, anyway, in order to contrast with Gryla’s revivification and reanimation of a skeletal black metal into something energetic, rabid, and frightening. Possessed by the spirit of death metal, Gryla’s sound is driven by fierce riffing and progressive song structures in a passionate display of venomous hunger. From off the voluminous shelves of codified blasphemy it’s rare to find such boundless energy and youthful savagery – in authenticity’s guise, Gryla is a one-Norwegian-teenager band, a mere seventeen at the time of recording. You’d never guess it from the mature displays of vitriol where the only real tell is manic excitement.

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The defining act of the last decade continues their hot streak of apparent magnum opus after opus, of elegies and eulogies alike for late-stage capitalism and postmodernism. Imperial Triumphant’s work is a serious and focused attempt to ascertain the hedonic treadmill, as society bores of untold wonders and unprecedented flourishing, they must metamorphosize again and again into greater intensity, harsher critique of wanton greed, wilder displays of human depravity. In that regard I have found Imperial Triumphant too successful in the past. Their beautiful deconstructions of evermore gilded and evermore higher towers are in turn flattened out into academic paperworks of theory and technique. I can appreciate their masterwork craftsmanship on a purely intellectual level, but just as one can see the pinnacle of humanity’s historical achievement in urban sprawl across the globe and feel nothing but disgust, so can I behold the most important avant-garde metal works of the modern era and feel nothing but boredom. In some way I imagine Imperial Triumphant is pleased with this result – by successfully creating art that mirrors individuals’ self-alienation, they create art that individuals self-alienate from, thereby becoming the subject of the text by engaging with the text. In other words – they’ve done it.

Goldstar changed all that. For the first time, I spent no time musing on the difference between enjoyment and education, didn’t consider whether virtue is inherent in surpassing confusion, never once had the thought, “this is good – but do I like it?” Instead, there was an immediacy, a newfound urgency, a familiar concept I was ashamed to eagerly welcome: accessibility. Gone were the baffling facades of hostile architecture, replaced with aggression and confrontation, out were the inconclusive atonalities and in are grooves and payoffs. On Alphaville, Imperial Triumphant paid tribute to their father, that did what they did in a bygone era, by covering the Voivod classic “Experiment”, and on Goldstar their act of spiritual succession becomes an act of spiritual surpassing, achieving Voivod’s remarkable balance of the off putting and the off kilter with the in vogue, and achieving in a wilder time, a record for the age. I have little doubt that they know exactly what they are doing here. Goldstar hints throughout that it knows what it is – bread and circuses, opium for the masses, populism from the demagogue’s mouth, the pyrrhic victory of democracy voting for its own execution. This gift of accessibility is a snake, a satirical smile and a sneer alike, the curling of the monkey’s paw. Yet again, by engaging with the text I become its subject, this time as the butt of the oldest cosmic joke: the fool in the world’s court.

I admit this all with a heavy heart. I would rather be in that first paragraph, enjoying the splendors of obtuse experimentation, than continue on in the second paragraph, happy to have my slop palatable and plentiful. Just last year I decried kindred spirits Pyrrhon for changing from their dense hostilities into a more crowd-pleasing guise. In their case, they did it out of exhaustion, a need for relief from the abstract cruelties of the world reflected in their music, a retreat into the comfort food of knuckle-dragging riffs and underbite-pulled faces. But I think Imperial Triumphant, in making a similar move, is brazenly pulling a fast one, a sleight-of-hand in plain sight. In giving me what I asked for, I welcome my own rebuke, in fact I eagerly embrace my condemnation at the hands of what I choose to listen to. I have hope that through the process of digesting this album I will learn to become a member of those mocked by the earlier album, but in the meantime, Imperial Triumphant is gleaming with pride to bestow upon me my participation trophy: a Goldstar.