Superstatic - Glimmering Veil (CD)

Review
Kaosguards
16/20
15.10.2021

Aborder l’écoute de ce second album des Irlandais de SUPERSTATIC (après « Key To The Abyss », paru en 2018) nécessite de prendre quelques précautions. En premier lieu, seuls les plus aventureux et résistants parmi les fans de Doom Death Metal sont susceptibles de parvenir au bout d’un voyage qui s’avère en tous points éprouvant. En second lieu, il faut avoir du temps devant soi (une heure et douze minutes précisément) et ne pas avoir le vertige ; car il va falloir gravir pas moins de sept montagnes, dont la plus petite, « Mutabor », affiche néanmoins un gabarit copieux de plus de huit minutes, et la plus haute, « Remember Citadel », culmine à plus de dix-sept minutes !!! Enfin, nous déconseillons vivement cet opus aux esprits guillerets et aux personnes suivies sur le plan psychiatrique ; les premiers risqueraient d’être traumatisés à vie, les seconds de perdre définitivement pied.

Voilà, les avertissements dûment effectués, les esthètes masochistes peuvent commencer leur progression parmi un dédale rythmique, ponctué de breaks, parfois d’accélérations, mais très majoritairement marqué par un tempo inexorablement lent. Le son général se veut sec, avec une basse tendue et métallique, des riffs rêches et dissonants ; le mixage assure une louable clarté d’exposition de tous les instruments, ainsi que des détails qui fourmillent à l’arrière-plan : bruitages, extraits sonores, arrangements électroniques et effets divers. C’est heureux car, là où d’autres sous-genres tournés vers les formes lentes et massives (on songe notamment au Funeral Doom) trouvent de bonne politique de proposer un mur du son et d’adopter la tactique du magma, SUPERSTATIC préserve une véritable profondeur de champ et une bonne dynamique d’ensemble.

Si l’ancrage Doom Death s’avère le plus légitime, on ne peut cependant pas affirmer que SUPERSTATIC ressemble à la musique produite par les pionniers du genre. Ne serait que par la sècheresse du son, mais aussi par les bruitages déjà évoqués, qui donnent l’impression d’un apport psychédélique qui aurait baigné dans une solution industrielle. De plus, si l’on s’attache aux ambiances torturées, notamment les vocaux qui ne se contentent pas de gutturalité, on peut sans forcer évoquer les tourments propres au Post Hardcore et au Post Metal.

Certes, « Glimmering Veil » constitue une œuvre ardue à appréhender, du genre qui se mérite. Pour autant, à condition d’accepter les règles du jeu, on ne peut que souligner la force expressive de ce répertoire irradiant la paranoïa et la schizophrénie, le malaise et l’oppression, le monumental et le fourmillement, la noirceur et le nihilisme. Fort et dérangeant.

Author: Alain Lavanne

Review
Nocleansinging.com
12.10.2021

Glimmering Veil is the second album by the Irish band Superstatic, and you’ll have difficulty finding a 2021 record that’s as simultaneously unnerving and fascinating. It’s a work of extravagant and unpredictable imagination, labyrinthine in its movements, fantastically textured in its sounds, and both deleterious and awe-inspiring in its moods.

It extends through seven long tracks across one hour and 12 minutes, but never allows the listener’s attention to wander. To borrow from the following review, we can recognize downcast and distraught human emotions in the music, but really, nothing sounds truly eartb-bound.

“Death/doom” is the simplest label one might affix to the music, but it would be an absurdly simplistic label, unless perhaps you add “avant-garde” or “experimental” as another descriptor, as a way of hinting at how wide-ranging the experience becomes.

We have a lot more to say about the album below, but beyond the torrent of linguistic impressions we also have a full stream of the album in advance of its imminent October 15 release by Solitude Productions.

Borrowing from the treasured Harlan Ellison, Superstatic named the opening song “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream“, and first released it with a video (which you’ll find below). It begins with slow, immense pounding coupled with raw, abrasive chords, low growling bass tones, high ethereal shimmering sensations, and macabre crocodile mutterings. The effect is eerie and ominous, but proves to be the prelude to a cataclysm of sound — a dense mass of marauding riffage, earthquaking low-end upheavals, and vicious vocal assaults.

The song continues to morph between these two sensations — the titanic crushing impacts and the paroxysms of violence, with quivering and screeching arpeggios lacing the slow detonations with shrill sounds of unearthly misery and derangement, and bursts of rapid-fire drum assaults continuing to fire the pulse during the more chaotic and mauling phases.

As openers go, “I Have No Mouth…” is riveting, and even perversely entrancing despite how brutally destructive and mentally unnerving it is. But the rest of the album is if anything even more unsettling and enthralling.

The songs continue to rely upon titanic low-end heaviness and skull-smashing percussive turbulence, while also weaving weird melodic tapestries and insinuating frightening vocal variations, which range from ghastly whispers to horrid roars, voracious growls, disturbing spoken words, and even wisps of angelic singing.

Depending on where you find yourself, the riffing slithers and becomes poisonous, whines like abandoned children, gouges and chews, darts and cavorts, jitters in frenzies, and jolts like enormous jackhammers. High wailing sounds and deep, solemn and soaring chants create hallucinatory moods of occult ritual and ghostly horror that chill the blood. Wafting arpeggios channel sanity-destroying grief, and glitter like gold.

You will hear bursts of flickering electronics, mysterious tones that resemble a bassoon, the pulse of a beating heart, the buzz of hornets, the sounds of a bass scraping against stone, a piano and violin duet coupled with dulcet singing, and celestial ambient radiations that create a feeling of spectral wonder.

In its rhythmic variations, the songs heave and stomp, crawl like giant dying beasts, and thunder in seemingly world-ending cataclysms.

The music becomes vast and void-like, immense in its terrifying magnificence, but also cramped and claustrophobic or barren and desolate in its manifestations of hopelessness. All these variations, and more, persist in drawing the listener forward, ever deeper into the terror realms that Superstatic have created on the other side of their glimmering veil. We can recognize downcast and distraught human emotions in the music, but really, nothing sounds truly eartb-bound.

With few exceptions the album is not a warm or welcoming experience, but it’s undeniably ingenious and indeed relentlessly fascinating, completely captivating from start to finish despite its significant length. We urge you to carve out the time necessary to listen to all of it:

Superstatic was created by Rustam, the founding member of Rakoth and Umbral Presence, who also used to play bass in Cruachan. Guitar parts on the new album were performed by Sergei Lazar of the band Arkona (and he also mixed the album), as well as band-members P.C. Stevens and Erwin Ryan, and Tauro Alterfour gets credit for the terrific drum performances. The alien angel voice was performed by Cynthia Voland.

The lyrics were based on works by Harlan Ellison, Wilhelm Hauff, Stephen King and Arthur Machen, and the videogames Morrowind and System Shock 2.

The album was mastered by Tom Waltz, who used to work with Venom, Annihilator, Dopethrone and many other artists, and it features artwork by Jane Dickson.