Style: Dissonant black metal with moments of beautiful melody
Primary Emotions/Themes: The beats that the band unleashed with their previous album has evolved, it is now a skilled hunter seeking its prey rather than ravishing everything in it's path.
Thoughts: Violence is such a delicate thing. It can bring about such unbridled destruction that there is nothing left (see Sherman's March to the Sea). It can also be refined, honed, and implemented with such precision that a singular act can bring about the downfall of an entire civilization, put the entire world at war, or end a life at a moments notice.
Violence can be harnessed in musical form as well. It takes many forms... anything from the chaos incarnate to a focus so intense, so fiercely acute, that it strikes exactly where it is mean to, no more, no less. It's this second version that Paracletus examines during its forty two minute run time.
Like most, if not all of Deathspell's releases Paracletus is difficult to define in the written word. Trying to describe everything contained in the album is an impossibility. Rather the generalities are the best that I'm going to be able to conjure.
Paracletus is a mix of controlled violence with moments of strikingly beautiful melodies. I would say at least 70-80% of the album picks up exactly where Fas... left off: riffs that aim to disintegrate everything that is listening, drums that match that cadence perfectly, and vocals that aim to dissolve everything with their strikingly potent vitriol. On this front, little has changed for the band. The dissonance remains, even if it is a bit more contained than the previous album.
Where the band deviates greatly though is that last 20-30%. It's here that the band explores what "dissonant melody" would sound like. This is not typical melodic black metal mind you, these melodies are created form the same violence that the dissonance is... but they are crafted in such a way that the violence is more palatable. Mere moments in the album were given a series of notes where the chaos resolves and my mind can go "oh! that sounds normal!" right before my sanity is stripped away from me again.
It's this balance of melodic dissonance (I realize that is not a possibility, but that's what this sounds like), and true dissonance that makes Paaracletus a unique album. Deathspell have never been a band to repeat themselves, always building, always evolving. It's this evolution that led to this albums creation, and in doing so created another one of the most important black metal albums in the post second wave era.
Written July 28th 2024
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