(We bring you DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Venetian band Obscura Qalma, which was released earlier this month by the Dusktone label.)
The nice thing about Italian symphonic death metal group Obscura Qalma is that they make absolutely no pretense of the style of music they’re going to make nor are they hiding who their influences are.
Obscura Qalma have been kicking around since 2018 and already have two albums and a few EPs – though one of each of those is the instrumental and orchestral version of songs from a previous album, much in the same way Fleshgod Apocalypse have taken to including the purely symphonic tracks as bonuses to their full-lengths recently. Adding to their name, all you need to do is look at a press photo of the band and you can tell there’s likely going to be a rich vein of SepticFlesh running through the group’s DNA.
Obscura Qalma don their lab coats and joyfully smash their death and symphonic elements together, cackling all the while, with lightning crashing in the background. Drawing heavily from the occult for lyrical inspiration – recently pulling large buckets up the well from the Aleister Crowley mines – Obscura Qalma are playing in a very wide musical sphere. The group’s latest EP Veils Of Transcendence punches in at four songs and a little under twenty minutes of boulder-heavy death metal with a huge symphonic and synth line buttressing the events and doing the melodic heavy lifting.
With only four songs it is tempting to romp around in the entrails of each one, slowly dissecting each song piece by piece and we might get there, but for the most part what you’ll understand from the first few moments of Veils Of Transcendence is that Obscura Qalma like to use bombast as a weapon as opposed to being the main driving force. Though you’ll hear symphonics worm their way heavily throughout Veils Of Transcendence, the band themselves still remain firmly planted in the forefront as opposed to letting themselves be obscured by what travels the woodwind or brass segment may be on in that particular moment.
Veils Of Transcendence has the requisitely evil atmosphere because that’s practically the job requirement at this point. You don’t look into occult matters and smash them into the obsession with grandeur that symphonic death has and not find yourselves cloaked in smoke and laying somewhere between Hollywood horror-film and a murderous Phantom Of The Opera. You exist by the big, booming movements and each step taken on the symphonic front is explosive – the band in front are basically required to punch above their weight and go toe to toe with it. They do that throughout, and if you want a fun deep drive into how they approach it on this EP’s opening song “Ophidian’s Enthronement”, we actually premiered the song a few weeks back and dove headfirst into it there.
Looking at the run times for the other songs on Veils Of Transcendence, you’d be safe in figuring that the EP’s opening song is meant to be the show piece, but part of that run time comes from the fact that Obscura Qalma are doing the dirty work of laying down foundational pieces for the other three songs. Every song after it stays at about the three and a half minute range and all of them feel like mirror forms of an idea, shards shattered into pieces and all reflecting upon the same basic whole — but due to the nature of how things break, every jagged edge is different and the shapes all vary from each other in spite of the subject being the same on the other end.
“Enochian Abyss” is one of two apocalyptically heavy songs and drags the band not just through the epic worlds of death metal but also brings them into the spectacle of blackened death from time to time. You could see them drawing comparisons to their chaotic fellow countrymen Darkend‘s brand of symphonic black throughout the song. “Enochian Abyss” is a massive track whose choirs elevate it to warring-states level of soundtrack and it gorges itself full within three mintues and twenty four seconds.
“Hexed Katharsis” is similarly martial at times and the two easily could’ve been twins elsewhere in opening the doors to musical oblivion and then just as rapidly slamming them shut. “Hexed Katharsis” builds and builds and builds a tower of music before reaching the final segment and then just cutting it off; just a rapid silence and Veils Of Transcendence ends. It’s like the portal from which Obscura Qalma were emanating was suddenly closed, whether everything that was meant to be said had been uttered or not.
There is both risk and a tendency for a lot of symphonic-leaning groups to drift into faceless spectacle and so far Obscura Qalma have managed to avoid that. The line, however, is razor thin and there’s always a sense that any group could lose themselves in their wash of orchestration and have things degenerate to such a point that the most important member of the band is the invisible fifth guy trapped behind a computer programming all the different walls of sound into a coherent whole. It’s why projects like this are also interesting, because each fight to avoid doing so feels more ‘raw’ than the last, and Obscura Qalma are the latest to emerge with their knuckles bloodied.
Even across four songs they’re making sure that everything here is in service of a grander picture and not just a desire to sound ‘huge’. They set out with a mission in mind for Veils Of Transcendence and made it so that each movement within those four songs did the heavy lifting of transforming the band into world-ending spectacle. While there is always that air of prestige granted to a full album release, the exploratory EP also deserves a ton of credit as well, and sometimes can work better for a style than forty-minutes to an hour’s worth. Sub-twenty of a massive creature slamming its fist into the ground and destroying continents-esque music turns out well for Obscura Qalma and should definitely buy them time for thier next expansive work.
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/veils-of-transcendence
https://obscuraqalma.bandcamp.com/album/veils-of-transcendence
https://www.facebook.com/obscuraqalma