My dad told me something that shocked me the other day. He told me that it's stupid to hate things just because other people like them. I try not show it, but I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of comments, so I felt a little insulted, and, goddammit, I have very good reasons to hate The Dark Side of the Moon! It's insipid, boring, agonizingly predictable and sounds like Pink Floyd pulled most of the songs out of their ass. I would go so far as saying that Pink Floyd were the masters of pulling stuff out of their asses. Otherwise, how can you explain stuff like the song “A Saucerful of Secrets”, the song “Bike” or, well, most of Atom Heart Mother? It's not like I hate them or anything. They simply rarely impress me. With The Wall, though, they have. There they picked a format where cheesiness and failure lurk at every corner, and pulled it off. Wait, scratch that, they didn't just pull it off, they goddamn nailed it. They made overproduced prog rock opera their bitch.
So, what does Deathspell Omega's Paracletus have to do with any of this? Well, I once saw a person wearing a Deathspell Omega tee at a small gig once, and in my book, that means they're huge. I haven't heard any of their older material, but if it is in any way similar to this newest work, then their status is perfectly justified. This masterpiece has a promising and dramatic start with “Epiklesis I”, and from that point on, it delivers and surpasses already impossibly high expectations. The riffing is at the same time very melancholic, intense, powerful and carries a very theatrical mood. The production is one of the best I've heard yet. The vocals are at the same time monstrous and very human and emotive, in other words, incredible. But I could say that about quite a lot of great but not a-freaking-mazing albums. What really makes Paracletus so good is how well planned it is.
The album is a bit longer than 40 minutes, and it seems like every single one of the minutes is part of something bigger. Much like The Wall, listening to this album feels like an event. The songs manage to perfectly stand on their own, but together, they're as good as... uh... fuck it, I don't know what to compare them to. And, as far as I can tell, it all boils down to timing. Everything just comes in precisely when it should in order to be pleasant. It's like this release had connected with the listener and complied with their every wish. There's this balance between dissonance, absolute chaos, “bigness”, tension, humanity, inhumanity, and emotion that is kept throughout and is never broken. Just as one gets tired of a certain mood, it switches to the most appropriate next mood, while managing to simultaneously never border predictability. Despite this, the songs themselves still somehow sound like actual songs. You can easily tell any two of them apart, and that's not something that can be said about quite a batch of extreme music. And it doesn't even sound like Deathspell Omega have even presented their full range here. It leaves you still wanting more, like if they had a lot more to show, but decided not to. All in all, imagine Stanley Kubrick deciding to make an Avant-Garde Black Metal album. Actually, don't imagine that. Just listen to this one.
Standout tracks:
Wings of Predation
Abscission
Malconfort
Have You Beheld The Fevers?
Devouring Famine
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