Goldicot Culls The Week - XIII

by Goldicot

Fri, 2 May 2025

Read in 4 minutes

Why they can’t play riffs that fucks all the time

weekly

Here is where I would pen my thoughts on Deafheaven, if I had any. Sometimes I stare blankly at these pages for hours or days waiting to figure out my angle on a particular album. Mere description is too perfunctory, but profuse superlatives are too dismissive, by dint of being too impersonal. The tone is struck through to the middle ground, an attempt to articulate the uniqueness of the work, all whilst trying not to kill the magic of the thing itself. On the other hand, there are some albums that I know I definitely do not have anything interesting to say about them, and I have no reservations whatsoever about leaving that duty entirely in the hands of others. Deafheaven is one of those. I don’t know what it is about, and I don’t think I ever will.

3

Power metal jumped the shark long ago and gave into a brutally fatalistic combination of excess and laziness. Any album daring to tread those waters has to rescue itself from its own form, lest ending up like the album cover. Panthalassan makes the most crucial recusement by restoring powerlessness to the conversation; each song is a struggle, battles are not always won, and the conflict is never ceasing. By freeing themselves from empty bombast in this way, they sing songs of determination, resolve, courage, perseverance, not of victory or strength, until earned. Heavy metal verse and chorus sing anthems of melancholy, almost tragedy, descending downward to low endings, resolving in sadness, before exploding outwards into exuberant guitar solo escapism, the flashy foreground of a complex and romantic picture. Weeks after listening to this, the choruses of multiple songs were still firmly lodged in my head; rarely is authenticity so catchy. 

2

War metal is not the sound of war transmuted by metallurgy. It is the sound of music against the listener. It is the war of body and mind against the sonic. You are scattered across battlefields that are scattered across you: the startle response to the unseen attack, the muscles tensing in readiness, the adrenaline and fury in vertiginous rise and fall, the defeat setting into the bones, by attrition, through fatigue. To willingly listen is to willingly grapple with the demon, wrestling down the onslaught to conquer the challenge. Teitanblood awaits you with open arms and bared teeth, ready to play games of survival: their games, your survival – if you win. The reward for your bravery – vast, enormous tombs of forlorn majesty. All this noise is merely desolate echo through an empty underworld, all this fury now but the crumbling of monuments. Once themselves gateways to death, now they too enter within to nothingness.

1

It’s not the heaviness, it’s the weight. Spiine carries the burden of the uniformly gray sky, not colorless but evenly monochrome, in the beleaguered trudging of a thousand journeys to the end. The end is not the enormity itself, though inescapable and all-consuming the weight is just the setting, pushing down, but the journey is forward… and down. Tetrapytch is a grim tale with only grief and terror as companions on the miserable trail. If it were only bitter songs of despondency and mournful melodies of loss, it would still be an awesome monolith, filled with dark and terrible portents of hopelessness. But it is also fearsome, a deceptive depression that harbors evils within. On “Myroblysiia”, when Xen’s yawning chasmal howls recall driving nails into hands of many endless limbs, a sound of hammering joins the chorus, almost but not quite at odds with the beat, before fading into the pounding of the drums themselves, leaving the question of whether it was always there behind. In some places the almost hopeful soaring of strings and bends give way to two rhythms clawing against one another, like two drummers in the ring, pulling off-balance, but not quite, just barely, never faltering. In a world of endless gray you long for pains such as these.