5/19/2023 0 Comments Xasthur bandcampIt’s frankly a shift that works for the project, elevating it’s depressive qualities while retaining the wicked resolve of the project as a whole. The song writing on Dampening Existence is noticeably more gothic, tending towards the soul shaking, cry and lament of Xasthur rather than the ghastly, Darkthrone possessed blitz of his previous efforts. Just about everything else about this new album is a departure for D, and not in a bad way. And of course there are D’s vocals which are like those of a man’s if he had been transformed into a frog and sat dormant long enough that a toxic black fungus had begone to colonize his throat. The massive sounding live drums that are shocking swift and biting, like a razorblade drawn across the skin. The groaning gothic synths, that lurch and wail with the weariness of life. Many of the dark and enticing elements from D’s past work carry over to his latest release. It’s pretty effective, like pouring wax from a cursed black candle on the blade of an ax so that you can hear the screams of the damned everytime you hit a tree with it (a common pastime in Ohio I hear). Dampening Existence doesn’t so much blunt these agonizing qualities as it does enhance them with layered distortion. The Emptiness had that hyper-compressed and sharp-edged tinny quality that is a stable and persistent aspect of both the genre’s aesthetic and a consequence of the conditions in which albums of this kind are often made (ie the concrete bunker of an unfinished basement). The most striking difference between these two albums is the production. The album follows his well received debut The Emptiness. He just released a new LP, his second, this past Octorber called Dampening Existence. WoeFul Echo is a one-man, depressed suicidal black metal band out of Ohio, centered around the talents of the singular D.
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