Extreme Metal- REVIEW- Aphotic, by Jupiterian: Will You Follow the Dark Collective?

Genre: Doom/Black/Death/Heavy Metal

Released: 14th August 2015

Label: Caligari Records

Listen here:
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/aphotic

Purchase here:
http://caligarirecords.storenvy.com/collections/277955-all-products/products/14066142-jupiterian-aphotic-cal-037



Aphotic is a call to join the Dark Collective where five songs of dense, sludgy, snarling, guttural, melodic, slow, terrible beauty lead you through a life spent lost in sweet, honey dripped poison.

Opening track ‘Permanent Grey’ introduces the Phantom Piper, the Happy Ghost of the Dark Collective. He takes your hand and welcomes you into the land of swamp thick dust and dreams where absinthe slick, hypnotic, seductive groves of sweet, sweet poison deliciously choke the air.

It’s dense here, very dense, the fog is almost impregnable, but the poison is so honey sweet, and it leads you through the darkness, seducing you into an awakened slumber. It feels safe here, so warm, so carefree, and you allow yourself to follow, to follow, to follow, and to be lost within the dream. You are entranced now, and the Piper no longer has to take you by the hand. You want to follow, you need to follow, and he leads you laughing, dancing, and skipping merrily into the Dark Collective.

‘Daylight’ shows the dawn, the light of truth. You wake, startled by the Sun, your eyes squint, but the poison honey, it’s still there, and you turn from the aggressive solar blast of the day, and back to the sweet coo of the Piper. You walk onwards, following, the trance still compels, and the journey continues.

Onto ‘Proclamation’ where the energy of the Sun is dampened, the fog descends, and the march onwards continues. Light struggles to emerge now. Energy is sapped, heads are low, and it’s turning funereal.

The Piper no longer laughs, no longer plays, no longer skips, his flute is a weapon now, he waves his followers on, threateningly, you’ve gone too far, and to stop would be to be lost in the dark, vulnerable to what hides in the fog. You follow not because of the sweetness in the air, but because fear compels, because you no longer have a choice. The time for seduction has passed. The bride is in chains now, and all that is left is the onwards, inevitable march of time.

The eternal child that is within begins to cry. Why is the Piper not smiling anymore? He used to dance, he used to play, he used to sing, but now all he does is point, and order, and scowl. You are scared. The Dark Collective no longer sings in sweet, hypnotic joy. They look at the ground. Together, individualism has been defeated. Low guttural sounds of terror, self- pity, surrender and despair has become their discordant song now. They sing it alone, walking side by side, but strangers all.

The Piper looks your way, reads your mind, and he smiles. You see his teeth now, and they are black stumps, worms crawl through the decay, sweetness has rotten away what once was pure, sweetness has destroyed the purity that came from God. The light of the Sun was there, offered, but rejected. Replaced by sweetness, you devil, the self-inflicted rot of prosperity, of a dulled, idle decadent complacency, sweet hypnotic rot, you will kill us all.

‘Aphotic’ is the end of life, the end of all hope. It’s a grinding halt, a STOP sign. You stare at the nothingness, the damp soil, lines and lines of defeated lost souls. You see shovels, and the Piper barks his last words. They are orders, and you must obey. Hands grasp handles, digging, digging, and digging. The air still fogged, sweetened not with honey, but with sod, the mud of the ground, from dust we became, from dust we shall return, wetted with damp soil, eaten by worms, we prepare our future, entranced by sweetness, defeated by prosperity, we dig our own eternities.

‘Drag Me to My Grave’ is the final plea, not for mercy, but for the end, for the nothingness that is to come. A life spent following the Piper, from the seduction of our senses, chasing the sweetness, joining the Dark Collective. We have allowed ourselves to be marched to the Graveyard, to the mud, to the shovel. Why do we chose to be lost in the fog, to follow the sweet, poison embrace of the Dark Collective, to lose ourselves, to stumble into fear, into routine, and so quickly into decay? We dig our own graves, and hypnotically, silently, jump into forever.



Rating: 10/10 (The sweet, terrifying choices that we make, the choices that lead to eternity)

Dyatlov Pass Incident- concept album: 1959 by Ellorsith

'1959' by Ellorsith

Released: 26th July 2014

Released by: Caligari records
http://caligarirecords.storenvy.com/collections/277955-all-products/products/9611893-ellorsith-1959-cal-015

Get album (you can download it for next to nothing) here:
https://ellorsith.bandcamp.com/releases



I’m a big proponent of hunting down (and paying for) cool, original, independently produced music that is free from the tyranny of corporate mainstream media control and editorial manipulation, but even I have problems sifting through the hundreds and hundreds of bands and labels that are out there.

It’s difficult to know where to start, even when like myself you are basically only looking within the death/black metal genres. Sometimes I check out the desperately lame corporate metal magazines, but aside from a free CD on the front cover I get little of worth from them, especially when their take on rebellion is to have a go at Jesus and to drink yourself into liver disease. They are lame, tame and almost completely useless when it comes to seeking out original, cool bands, especially bands that actually want to say something that has contemporary socio-political relevance.

So what I end up doing is going on the Internet, normally on bandcamp, and take a lucky dip. I’ll listen to a couple of minutes of a band’s stuff, and pay for a cassette/CD and digital download. If you want to get the attention of somebody like me, somebody who will pay for your stuff, and do a quick review of it on his blog, here are a couple of things that would help me out, and make it more likely that I would check out your stuff.

1- Make your song titles/lyrics have contemporary relevance to the fascist new-world-order tyranny that is being constructed around us right now.
2- Have a really cool album cover/artwork.
3- Do an interesting concept album on something cool, occult, creepy, paranormal, historical, philosophical or socio-politically relevant.

Yeah, I know. Asking bands to discuss important issues rather than having a go at easy targets like Christianity and Fox News is probably asking for a bit too much at the moment. I understand. We have all gone through the same system of educational/mainstream media brainwashing since birth, so breaking out of the matrix is bloody difficult. Most people don’t do it because they don’t even see the matrix in the first place. But having a cool cover on your album is something that a band can easily do, as is an interesting concept album. That’s what led me to check out ‘1959’ by Ellorsith. The cover works, but it’s the concept that intrigued me.

Here's the team at the beginning of their expedition

I vaguely knew about the concept they were taking on.  A team of Russian mountaineers goes missing in suspicious circumstances right in the middle of the phoney US/USSR ‘cold-war period.’ A search party eventually finds their bodies, and it all looks very weird, and absolutely terrifying. If you want more details then click on the links at the end of this review.

In short, nobody is quite sure of exactly what happened, and how an experienced team of mountaineers all died in such bizarre and mysterious circumstances. Was it an avalanche? A military testing site? A Yeti? A UFO?  A Russian snow goblin? You get the picture, anyway the point is that something like this would make a great concept album for a shouty, screamy metal band, and that’s exactly what 1959 by Ellorsith is. They’ve done what should have been done bloody ages ago and made an album based on it. So, to the obvious question, is it any good?

Yeah mate, it’s bloody brilliant. Twenty seven minutes of howling winds, guttural despairing wails, growls, screams, pleading for mercy (in Russian) and the overall feeling of sheer unadulterated freezing cold terror. If you didn’t know this album was about some poor kids being scared sh**less, then one listen will fill you in very quickly, no context needed.

Here they are at the middle, just kids really.

It starts slowly, with a voice that sounds like a young mountaineer recording a voice message before the disastrous, final trek. The background music is already foreboding, menacing, the calm, but bloody creepy as heck calm, before the world falls onto their heads.

What follows is screaming terror, a cacophony, wall of sound snowblast of noise with what sounds like a supernatural beast screaming about what it's going to do to the poor mountaineers. It’s unrelenting, brutal, horrific and intense as anything you can possibly imagine. This is music with a purpose, and that purpose is to invoke a feeling of terror. It does this, extremely well.

The album closes with a track called, ‘Compelling natural force’ which is the phrase used by official investigators of the incident, basically admitting that they didn’t have a clue about what happened, other than it was violent, inexplicable and that everybody died. This track sounds like men lost in a forest, running from something, they are exhausted with nowhere left to run, they stop, cry to their mother’s, and wait for their inevitable death.

If you are planning on a hiking expedition then you’ll want to give this one a miss, especially now in these winter months when the darkness is creeping around us from dawn to dusk. It’s a pretty bloody terrifying listen, creating an atmosphere of constant dread, fear and oh crap, I guess that time has finally ran out for me terror.

The remains of their tents, ripped open from the inside.

We’ll probably never know what happened on the Dyatlov Pass, but this album does a horrifically fantastic job of describing the awful emotions that were running through the minds of the poor kids who went through it all.

I’m very much looking forward to Halloween this year, as I always do, but Halloween is always Scooby Doo horror to me. It’s funny, silly old Farmer Jones in a daft mask getting exposed by the stoner Dog and his buddies. 1959 is not Scooby Doo horror; it’s real horror. The kind of horror you feel when all hope is lost and you are running barefooted in the snow with some unknown monstrosity stalking your every frost-bitten footstep.

Some of the mountaineers died of exposure and hypothermia, but some of them died due to blunt force trauma. The injuries were described as being supernatural, coming from something that was not human. One of the female climbers had her tongue missing. That ain’t Scooby Doo, that’s bloody terrifying, and so is this album.


Rating: 10/10 (great concept, even better album)


Click here for more info on the Dyatlov Pass incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Youtube video on the incident:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVHFHIP9eWk