MYLINGAR: “DÖDA DRÖMMAR”

 

The 2016 debut EP by the mysterious Swedish band Mylingar, Döda Vägar, was a nightmarish hybrid of black and death metal that seemed designed with the objective of inflicting torment and terror on a thermonuclear scale, igniting one violent hurricane of hate after another, each song ravaging the listener’s head with horrendous and even stupefying power while managing to provide unsettling changes of mood and gripping grooves to latch onto as handholds in these storms of sound.

A paradoxical combination of eagerness and fear gripped me upon learning that Mylingar had completed a debut album, and today it has been released through a conspiracy between Amor Fati Productions and Vigor Deconstruct/Fallen Empire Records. The name of the album is Döda Drömmar. How does it measure up against that frighteningly powerful first EP?

 

 

Some warnings — or inducements, depending on your tastes — remain relevant: Mylingar are still devoted to delivering sonic violence and terror, and are still highly skilled assassins. They regularly blowtorch the nerves with adrenaline-fueling typhoons of battering percussion, roiling guitar abrasion, and utterly bestial vocal assaults. But as before, they leaven these remorseless attacks in different ways, and here they’ve enhanced and elevated the dynamism and atmosphere of the experience, and added even sharper hooks to better lodge these harrowing terrors in the listener’s head.

Döda Drömmar is fire and ice — the fire of violent lunacy, the ice of cold-blooded murder — cloaked in a shroud of hallucinatory vapors. The music is steeped in unsettling dissonance, laced with nightmarish bursts of alien sound, abrasive blaring chords, long moaning and wailing guitar reverberations, and other less easily identifiable musical textures. The rhythms gallop in mad, barbaric charges and stomp with brutal force. The vocals are demonic. All human warmth has been banished from these songs, leaving the field to the dominance of derangement and destruction.

But man, as harrowing as this music is, it’s thoroughly electrifying, and with enough twists and turns and dense layerings of ingredients that it keeps you on the edge of your seat rather than becoming numb despite the overall relentlessness of the onslaughts.

 

The distorted, abrasive quality of the riffs and the heavy, gravelly tone of the bass (which often drives with pneumatic dedication) give the songs both a thick, toxic, choking power and a bone-breaking impact, depending on whether the riffs are swarming or jolting. The thundering blast beats quicken the pulse, while the ritualistic pounding clubs the skull. The bass lines, whether maniacal or methodical, vibrate the spine. The piercing guitar leads all have the resonance of insanity (in the sense of both berserker rage and shattering bleakness).

Torrential speed is the hallmark of the first two songs, as well as others, but the band are also generous in slowing the cadence, providing breaks in the faster songs and allowing slower, more plague-stricken movements to dominate others. If anything, the horrifying impact of the music reaches its zenith in the less frenzied passages, where bizarre electronic sounds, exquisite forms of guitar torture, other-dimensional spearing and swirling notes, and grotesque crocodilian proclamations are given space to unbalance your mind and disfigure your sanity.

But, as noted, there are hooks in these songs (all of them diseased) and rhythms that connect to your motor reflexes. Even at their most barbaric, the tracks aren’t simply spasms of chaos. Thought and careful planning went into these insidious creations, even if the thinking and blueprints have the mark of deviancy on them.

In a nutshell, Mylingar have followed a striking EP with an even more striking album, and one that’s quickly become a 2018 favorite of this writer. Hope you dig it, too.

 

As of today, Döda Drömmar is available for order on CD and LP; a cassette tape edition is expected later this year.

Bandcamp:
https://mylingar.bandcamp.com/album/d-da-dr-mmar

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/mylingar