AN NCS PREMIERE: GREYTOMB — “FORCE MAJEURE”

Oct 062017

Transcending Obscurity Records has allied itself with a significant number of excellent extreme metal bands from Australia, including The Dead, The Furor, Illimitable Dolor, Somnium Nox, and Norse, and recently the Australian black metal band Greytomb has joined those ranks.

The band’s first recording was a 2015 demo, The Mourning Field, and they followed that with a debut album last year, A Perpetual Descent. What lies ahead is a new EP named Monumental Microcosm, which the band describe as “a serious transition from the music we were creating to what we will be creating” — “a new era of dark, cosmic and nihilistic art!” It will be released by Transcending Obscurity on December 19th.

Monumental Microcosm consists of three substantial tracks, one of which it’s our pleasure to present to you today: “Force Majeure“.

photo by Natalie Morgan

Greytomb consists of guitarist J. Angus, vocalist N. Magur, and bassist D. Coffey, with drums performed on the EP by Forge (from Norse and Somnium Nox).

The warped dissonant notes that ring like chimes above the surge of abrading riffs and the atypical syncopation of the drum rhythm at the outset of “Force Majeure” almost immediately create a feeling of arcane mystery and growing peril, and that sense of tension and threat in the music only grows stronger as the vocalist’s terrible howls and incendiary shrieks begin venting fury and madness.

The caustic haze of guitar noise never disappears, though it lessens in intensity, as does the torrent of drum thunder, but if anything the music only becomes more chilling as the pace subsides and the voice turns from flensing ferocity to proclamations uttered slowly in a cavernous, serrated growl, and to a haunting vocal melody.

As the derangement in the music boils over again, an air of shattering grief becomes entwined with the kind of poisonous and otherworldly malignancy that you can almost feel seeping through the skin and eating into the marrow. As disturbing as the music is, you may not realize until silence comes that it has been casting a very dark and hallucinatory spell all along.