Entry 345 - Departe - Failure, Subside

 

Departe is one of those bands that incorporates a lot of different influences into one final product and somehow makes it all work. On Failure, Subside they are one part dissonant black/death metal, one part post-rock, and one part post apocalyptic noise. I haven't really hard the combination anywhere else to this extent and it's a combination that works quite well.

I had forgotten about these guys for the longest time. I recently went back and re-tabultated my best of the year lists for all the recent years and these guys were on there for 2016. I didn't remember much of how the album sounded so I went to go give it a listen. It was pretty damn good, so I went to see how much the record was... and let's just say the price was right. So now it's in my collection.

Failure, Subside takes a little bit out of many different genres. The songs are long and ebb and flow much like a post rock song. There is a large amount of dissonance and in the riffs accompanied by sections where the band allows the music to decay into nothingness, giving it almost a dark ambient feel at points.

All these elements on their own are cool, but they have to be put together carefully for the style to work... and it works very well here. The band knows how to use the song lengths to the absolute maximum. One moment the album will be blasting full bore, then it will slow down and allow the instruments to breathe. Heavy reverb is used at key points of the record to add to this apocalyptic feel that the guitars give. At a few choice moments of the album clean vocals are also utilized. Its the complete package.

The atmosphere is nothing short of oppressive. It feels like the world is going to end, and we are merely listening to the soundtrack to its demise. It has a very close resemblance to the atmosphere found on Ulcerate's song Omens, except expanded out into a full album. That is an excellent song in its own right, and by extension this is an excellent album.