INFANT ISLAND – OBSIDIAN WREATH

(Andy Synn takes a trip to Infant Island on their new album, Obsidian Wreath)

What’s in a name, they say?

Well, when it comes to genre-names the answer can be… quite a lot, as it happens.

Case in point, depending on what tags I apply to Obsidian Wreath – call it “Screamo”, call it “Blackgaze”, call it “Post-Metal” – your reactions, and your expectations, might be wildly different.

The truth, of course, is that it’s actually a little bit of all these things, equally indebted to the likes of Pg. 99 and Envy as it is latter-day Panopticon and early Deafheaven, with the end result being… well, you’ll just have to read on to find out, won’t you?

It’s obvious from about seventeen seconds into opener “Another Cycle”, where the song blooms into vicious, visceral – yet also strangely beautiful – life, that catharsis is the name of the game on Obsidian Wreath.

But it also quickly becomes clear, as the album progresses, that Infant Island understand that simple catharsis, the purging of emotion without purpose or direction, can also leave you empty unless there’s something else – in this case, a blazing fire of righteous, incandescent rage – which can fill the void.

What this means is that the eye-opening emotive expulsion driving songs like the utterly ferocious “Fulfilled” and the oh-so-aptly named “Unrelenting” (with the latter’s mix of searing savagery and sombre melody making it one of the album’s many stand-outs) feels less like a random outburst of raw, unfocussed fury (though there’s definitely a lot of that going on) and more like an honest reaction to the times we live in.

And while Obsidian Wreath, on the surface at least, may not seem like an explicitly or overtly “political” album, the truth is that its very creation is an act of defiance, a refusal to give in to apathy or despair, one which shines like a ray of hope in an often hopeless world.

Indeed, it’s this balancing of melancholy and elation, despair and determination, which makes moments like the ecstatic frenzy of “Clawing, Still”, the gloom-shrouded grandeur of “Veil” (which shares at least a few sonic similarities with long-time NCS favourites Svalbard and Downfall of Gaia), and stunning centre-piece “Amaranthine”, such a compelling collection of cleverly contrasting, seemingly contradictory, yet endlessly captivating elements.

Culminating with the blistering beauty and visceral intensity of “Vestygian” – which exemplifies and embodies all the best parts of the band’s sound, all scalding guitars and scathing screams, wild, surging percussion and bleak, brooding ambience, in one final climactic act of cleansing catharsis – Obsidian Wreath, for all that it reckons with ideas of grief and anguish, is an album which aims, ultimately, to uplift and empower its listeners and to remind them that, even when things seem their darkest, to exist is to resist.

Yet the vine keeps growing, flowering with little light or water
It creeps into my bones: amaranthine, composed of torture
Embedded to blossom alone, yet alive like sunlight, nonetheless