(Here we have DGR‘s review of the debut album by the Greek symphonic death metal band Thy Shining Curse, released by ViciSolum Records in mid-February.)
Thy Shining Curse is a project that snuck up on us – the result of many a Bandcamp tumble and record label page scour, mostly to see what projects are doing what these days. Even though their debut album Theurgia has been out for a few months by this point – have to keep the perpetually tardy streak alive – the aura of intentional mystery surrounding the album was enough to grab interest. Mostly curiosity for both what it is as well as who was involved in assembling the machine in the first place.
The group are intentionally keeping things a bit vague, as Thy Shining Curse is a solo project belonging to musician Leonidas Diamantopoulos, while the album credits – courtesy of the label – add vocalist Cezar Moreira and guitarist Gabe Pietrzak as co-conspirators in making the creature that is Theurgia breathe. But to walk that back a little, as just about everyone these days is enjoying their time with the masks-and-robes aesthetic, just what the hell are Thy Shining Curse and Theurgia and why does it seem they are walking among us now?
Photography: Evi Christopoulou
Thy Shining Curse are a symphonic death metal group with aspirations to be part visual component/part band, with the whole overarching event tying into the main lyrical concept that drives Theurgia, which the band describe as being:
“[A] collection of seven musical rites, revolving around a common thematic axis; transgressing the physical world. Theurgia stands for “divine work” in Greek and was developed as a term by the Neoplatonists. It describes a series of magical acts that aim to connect the human soul to a hierarchy of superior beings, leading up to the supreme being or so-called, The One.”
The album itself consists of seven songs, each with its own ritualistic name – one intro track and six densely packed symphonic death songs, each hovering at about the five and a half minute range. Theurgia is a grand idea with grand scale attached to it and something that is very ambitious for a debut release suddenly appearing out of the aether early this year.
There are two kings or titans – depending on where you fall taste-wise of course – when it comes to symphonics and death metal being smashed into one another, and it’s hard to dodge comparisons to the two if you have this sort of project going. One way or another people are going to have you on a bent and warped scale that places you around either the Fleshgod Apocalypse or Septic Flesh playground.
Thy Shining Curse falls closer to the former than the latter, steering hard to avoid moments wherein the music is just pure orchestration the entire time, though Thy Shining Curse are still in the aspirational phase of things where the band have plenty of room to chart their own path, so they’re kind of weirdly placed at a seventy-five percent there mark.
Theurgia has a lot of time wherein it’s just the core expected metal instruments hitting exceptionally hard, and often, it’s just one vocalist against the world – whether the mysterious singing female or the hefty death grunt – driving things forwards. Thy Shining Curse don’t make much room for big, bombastic choirs. Orchestrations, keyboards, and symphonic work are used as amplification of what the core of the group is already doing.
Thy Shining Curse excell at making use of the tools available to them and do well at making their songs as intricate as you’d expect. Normally you’d expect that an album full of tracks hovering around the five- and six-minute length would all be plodding or mid-tempo adventures, yet Theurgia more often than not is moving at a faster clip.
Theurgia clocks at around thirty-seven minutes in length yet there are many times when it seems to loop back around to the beginning, speeding through various checkpoints before they even got a chance to hammer on the stopwatch. That’s the result of a handful of solid rumblers, two more ambitious numbers, and a hell of a closing pair of songs in “Heptacletus” and “Melmoth”. Thy Shining Curse aren’t oppresively blast-heavy – the go-to for epic atmospheres – but instead stick to quick-moving grooves and marathon runner-esque double-bass-pedal backings. Again, these’re ‘big’ songs but not full-on delusions of grandeur… yet.
Theurgia is both a rock-solid debut and a great surprise. The zeitgeist can get fucked, we’re months late getting to it, but it’s still worth it to explore the world that Thy Shining Curse are attempting to craft on their first full-length. It’s not often you’re in the entryway for the beginning steps of a sculptor nor do you get the sense of just where a project is going, but Theurgia is already offering some tantalizing hints. These six songs both soar and crash into the Earth hard, making use of every groove available and picking and pulling from the death metal riff hall with gleeful abandon.
Right now, Thy Shining Curse have a solid split going between their orchestral ambitions and the main core of pummeling music. Their future may see the scales tip in either direction as these projects often do, given how tentative a line it is to walk this combination without one overpowering the other. The band’s travels in the future will be observation-worthy, because with Theurgia they’ve already proven they have a life-crushing grasp on the basic core of what makes the symphonic death combination so good.
https://vicisolumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/theurgia
https://www.facebook.com/ThyShiningCurse/