Style: Dissonant black/death metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: Violence
Thoughts: What a great album title. It captures the essence of the album perfectly. Aosoth's third album is one of the vicious and chaotic albums that I've heard in recent memory. These guys know exactly what they want to achieve with their music and this album is the near perfect execution of that philosophy.
The songs have no individual names they are only labeled as individual scenes. I think scenes here is a very apt term. Each one of the compositions feels like a singular part of a longer song. This thing is incredibly cohesive - it ebbs and flows in a way that a soundtrack would. Except instead of an orchestra or other instrumentation playing the soundtrack we have dissonant metal.
I do have to emphasize that this is dissonant. Every part of this is unpleasing to the ears at first. The riffs, the vocals, the drums, and especially the production. This isn't harsh production in the sense of early second wave black metal would be, no this is harsh in the same way that a worn out cassette tape is. You can hear the concepts of what is going on, but the details are a bit obscured - even when you are listening intently at what is going on.
The production aside these riffs are well constructed. These songs or scenes put the riffs together in such a way that they flow into each other effortlessly which is about the only thing in this album that is easy follow. The riffs themselves play notes that don't typically belong together and the production makes these chromatic notes sound even less pleasant to the ears.
There are breaks where things calm down. The start of Scene three gives us a 30 second respite with a piano interlude before the insanity starts back up a few moments later. There are also some riffs that border on melodic, but never quite get there. Teetering on the knifes edge as it were.
The band has absolutely mastered pacing and and tempo in this release. The band knows when to slow things down, they know when to blast away. They know when to be quiet and they know when to make your ear drums bleed.
Scene IV has this wonderful section towards the end where the band laces riff after riff with slower tempos. By the end of it they have come to a near stop before silence kicks in. After a few seconds of just static the band blows my fucking ears out with a blast beat and insane riff. It's a huge moment in the album and I anticipate it eagerly every time I put the record on.
Scene V comes crashing out right after it with one of the most powerful riffs in the entire album. It's slow and menacing and the crackly production only makes it incredibly difficult to fully process. There is the closest thing that the album has to melody as well played over the massive rhythm. It's all building up to something and by the time the vocals come in the riff has shifted into this incredible tidal wave of noise and dissonance. It can't be stopped. It's a force of nature.
Violence and Variations was not an album I intended to pick up at first. The album is as rough as it is unwelcoming. I happened upon it at my local store and thought fuck it I may as well. I'm glad I did. Even more so I'm glad I stuck with the album through it's uninviting character. There is a ton of amazing music on here, you just have to brace yourself for a difficult uphill climb to fully appreciate it.
Written February 2nd 2024
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