Trepaneringsritualen     

The Totality Of Death

Malignant Records 2013

It's somewhat strange but the first time I listened to this album I just happened to be watching Japanese tsunami footage and the visual aspect with one meshed with the audio aspect of the other in such a way that I was feel with dread.  These death worshipping masters of black industrial ambience have created an album that is pure apprehension and sonic terror.  Death Reveler is ominous and feels so inevitable with is cold, calculated vocals and plodding guitar chords.  The chiming bell adds to the frightening immediacy of the song.  Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas is perhaps the truly scariest composition I have heard in a long time.  It is so relentless and terrifying with its repetitive, circular noise.  The 11+ minutes of the track leave me filled with a disconcerting sense of horror.  It's as if death were pressing closer and closer to me and there was no hope of escape.  Up next is For Svears Val with its deep echoes of hellish darkness and washed out synth.  It's like Skinny Puppy but soooooo much darker.  The beat pounds at a distance but still instills a feeling of fright within your soul.  A more tribal beat accompanies All Hail The Black Flame.  The whole song takes on a black metal ritual with its pounding beat and blasphemous vocal incantations.  Cherem takes a different approach as it is much more subtle and quiet.  The ambient noise is more distant despite the highly mechanized vocals monopolizing the foreground of the song.  Drunk With Blood's rapidly shifting annihilation of destructive notes and disorienting progression leave this song as an exercise in claustrophobia.  Lightbringer crackles with sinister intensity and flows out like a satanic Doppler effect.  The vocals are buried but the electronic notes wax and wane depending on the immediacy of the song.  This leaves you with an unsettling sense of panic and alarm.  The Totality Of Death is just what its name implies, an album of pure darkness and incalculable terror.  There have been few albums I have heard in my lifetime that have filled me with a deeper sense of dread and hopelessness.  Just like the tsunami that swept through Japan, Trepaneringsritualen drowns you in unstoppable, inevitable darkness and death.