Style: Dissonant black/death metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: Hopelessness as the darkness collapses in on me, here in this light starved place only death and decay remain
Thoughts: Subtlety: the quality of being understated, delicate or nuanced. When applied to music this generally means that the music requires in depth listening and has layer upon layer of qualities to unfold as the music takes the listener deeper and deeper into its grasp. Deliverance form the Godless Void has none of that.
The instant the albums starts Desolate Shrine uppercuts the listener with a riff that is so aggressive and infused with hate that it knocked me flat on my ass the first time I heard it. The guitars act with such malice that they are an instrument of dismantling the human psyche. There is no mercy, no hesitation, and most of all... no subtlety to their intent. This is as overt as it gets.
Of course this is all conjecture, I don't know the intent of the band when they wrote this song... but The Primordial One is one hell of an opener. Even as the song devolves further into madness the blatant nature of the song unfolds to deeper levels. By the end the band has gone through so many riffs that it's hard to tally them all up... and I swear I hear almost an entirely different song being played along side it as the piano distorts reality further and further in the background.
Lord of the Three Realms takes a slightly different approach... it implores the same results, but with a slower pace. The song, rather than obliterating the listener immediately, takes its time to bore it's tendrils deep into my mind and slowly grind me to dust. Perhaps this is the more painful way to go, as with the first song at least it was over quickly.
The imagery and band name is one of the best that I've seen in metal. Desolate Shrine is such a vivid name... a holy place abandoned by everyone. I get this image of a forsaken building in the middle of a distant mountainside waiting for worshipers of a god that will never come. The minimalist artwork feeds into this even more, with a disembodied hand reaching out to an empty landscape.
The music is the embodiment of this visual image. Violence, rage, death, decay, and yes, even subtlety are all found in copious amounts throughout Deliverance... Desolate Shrine play with a rare intensity. It's this intensity and their attention to the finer details that creates an album that stands on the shoulders of giants... the giants of dissonance.
Written July 29th 2024
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