This is the second album from Italian black metal band Gorrch.
Across 37 minutes Gorrch rage with furious intensity, and do so with a slithering dissonance that’s born of arcane venom. Stillamentum is vicious, but not without nuance or layers. In fact, there’s a quite a lot under the surface of the claustrophobic nightmarescape that Stillamentum portrays.
Stillamentum is an album of hostile darkness and emotive intensity. The songs are imbued with a dense technicality that’s withering and harsh. They’re scathingly fast and precise, channelling raw chaos through a surgical assault that would put many a tech death band to shame with its accuracy of attack. When the band slow, they bring their more atmospheric components to the foreground. When this occurs, the songs reveal a depth of malevolent feeling and grim atmosphere that’s impressive.
Whether fast or slow, the material is imbued with esoteric atmosphere and arcane moods; Gorrch simply manipulate the levels of violence and aggression on display. This is, of course, grossly oversimplifying the songwriting, but suffice to say that throughout Stillamentum Gorrch unleash a torrent of music that is intricate, dark, and absorbing. The acidic screams may burn and the guitars may cause lacerations, but that’s the price to pay for a record of this quality.
Interestingly, despite the controlled chaos on display, Stillamentum is not as thoroughly inaccessible as some albums that carry the dissonant black metal tag, (or similar). This is dark dissonance filtered through a black metal lens that allows Gorrch to take songwriting strengths from the classic black metal styles, as filtered through a contemporary lens. The end result is a modern black metal album that’s steeped in abstruse dissonance, but that retains enough to grasp hold of at a visceral level; Stillamentum balances harrowing nightmare and engaging blackened entertainment remarkably well. The number of tension-filled hooks on this thing is obscene.
Make no mistake though, Stillamentum is not for the uninitiated. It’s a snarling daemon of exacting technicality, lethal dissonance, and warped ritualistic emotion. However, if you’re accustomed to the more refined and rarefied realms of the dissonant black metal underworld then this should be an enticement rather than a barrier; Gorrch have produced an album that has much to explore.
Abrasive, but sickeningly beautiful.
Essential listening.
Wonderbox Metal 