Eclipser – Pathos (Review)

This is the debut album from Canadian black metallers Eclipser.

This is black metal played with dark brutality and dissonant intensity. It’s a blackened hybrid that focuses more on black metal than anything else, but still finds time to incorporate death metal elements into itself with a voracious hunger. It’s overwhelmingly bleak and aggressive, but has surprising moments of melody and coherence mixed in with its jagged dissonance and unfriendly exterior.

Harsh dissonance assaults your ears with grim persistence, and corrupted, twisted melodies work their way out of the band’s filthy murk like poisoned streaks of dying light. Occasionally one of these melodies takes on a life of its own and evolves into a solo, screaming with energetic speed and in unpredictable directions. Wrapped up in a serving of decaying blackened riffs and foul, brutal auras, these songs batter you senseless with blunt force before breaking out their serrated claws to finish the job.

Piercing shrieks and ugly growls accompany you down into the darkness, savagely tearing your soul apart while they feast on your flesh.

With misanthropic atmosphere and malignant presence, Pathos is an album for those times when you want something dark and blackened, but with teeth and a grim intensity born from dissonance and death metal. Check it out.