This is the second album from US one-woman black metal band Feminizer.
Beneath the Harm is a 43-minute journey into nightmare and pain, one that’s frequently gorgeous, despite its venomous bite. It’s a multifaceted exploration of raw blackened expression. It’s one that embraces the artist’s vision wholly, resulting in material that drips emotion and passion through every devastating pore.
Ethereal Noose opens the album with a raw mess of savage intensity and grim darkness. It’s a track that wants to bite your face off and eat out your skull. It’s not pretty, offering an impenetrable web of abrasive aggression that nonetheless reveals moments of deeper sophistication if you can survive its vicious onslaught long enough to look that closely. Ethereal Noose hasn’t even burned itself out before Cross My Heart kicks in with a beat worthy of a dancefloor. It’s a melancholic depressive black metal hymn that takes Feminizer’s sound and wraps it in the warmth of the grave.
Internalized Prison Complex is a creation of pure atmospheric immersion. It starts with beautiful piano, and builds emotion over time, culminating in a whirlwind of blackened aggression that’s softened by mood-rich enhancements.
Licking Wounds opens with a striking synth-driven 80s beat, before bringing in sheets of shimmering distorted blackness and static-like screams. It’s a sharp, ethereal slice of atmospheric black metal that scythes through the airwaves like something beautiful and deadly. Next is the album’s longest cut – Apparition of Flesh – which serves us with a feast of soft, luscious synths and gentle beats, before morphing into the sort of worldbuilding that many a band would kill for. The song is crafted by resplendent structures that take an expansive approach to blackened atmosphere, and the entire song is a masterclass of how to captivate and fascinate the listener.
Like the previous two tracks, The Girl Had Secrets is another song that embraces atmosphere and mood alongside a serrated edge. By this point the artist behind Feminizer has firmly established her ability to craft affecting soundscapes that combine beauty and darkness, and The Girl Had Secrets is another great example of this.
The album closes with Painspells, which builds and swells into an infernal grandeur that’s epic in scope, yet intimate in impact. It feels like a grandiose blackened landscape has revealed itself purely and completely to you and you alone, drawing you in with its ruinous majesty. It shines with underworld light, while beguiling with its malevolent familiarity.
Beneath the Harm is a lesser-found sliver of underground black metal that’s far more expressive and well-crafted than most. Rich in atmospheric depth and delivered with opulent emotional weight, Beneath the Harm is a record to delve deeply into and get washed away by its barbed seas of beauty.
Essential listening for connoisseurs of the black metal underworld.
Wonderbox Metal 