This is the debut album from Greek black/death metal band Kvadrat.
The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion is a 44-minute leviathan that swims through dark, dissonant waters with the self-assured skill of an apex predator. Combining black and death metal into a monster of dissonant nightmare, the artist behind Kvadrat’s skill in delivering this style is impressive and rewarding.
The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion takes influences from bands like Ulcerate and Deathspell Omega, forging them into a new otherworldly entity. This aberration of the natural order of things may share a spectral ancestry with those two veteran acts, but is also its own shade of sentient darkness.
Kvadrat’s music is pitch-black, riven with lightless dissonant melody, and shrouded in impenetrable ominous atmosphere. It’s also rock-shatteringly violent and brutally heavy. It’s music that carries a great weight with it, crushingly so with its great slabs of thick distorted corruption. This weight is more than physical though, it reeks of tainted spiritually, as if the music is clawing itself into your deep inner self, dragging you down into the warped and infected gloom, never to return.
For all its grim suffocating horror, The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion is not a featureless, undifferentiated mass of violent chaos. The songs writhe and pulse with dread-filled vibrancy, offering a journey into tenebrosity that’s composed of varying venomous expressions of unlight; all may be terrifying, but some are more harrowing and disturbing than others. This is a textured display of dissonant might, one that’s haunted by an atmospheric presence every bit as potent as its devastating destructiveness.
Kvadrat’s debut album is both colossal and affecting. Between the furious groove and ferocious blast beats on the the one hand, and the expressive melody and nuanced guitars on the other, you have a release that stands tall and strong against the dissonant hordes.
Don’t miss out on this.
Wonderbox Metal 