DORMANT ORDEAL: “TOOTH AND NAIL”

(DGR provides the following extensive and evocative review of the new album by Poland’s Dormant Ordeal in advance of its April 18 release by Willowtip Records. At 3PM PDT today the entire album stream will premiere here.)

The idea of saving the best for last is something that is hammered into our psychology since early childhood. You must save the best for last, you must save the best for last, you must save the best for last, repeated over and over ad nauseum in mantra-like form until it eventually becomes unspoken sutrah to us as children growing up.

In the current age of instant gratification and the endless dopamine chase of modern society, however, saving the best for last is something that is long lost and a spectre of ages ago. Yet in a strange way it seems as if Poland’s Dormant Ordeal have taken the idea and run with it for their newest album Tooth And Nail because over the course of the album’s eight songs – barring one intro ambient bit – it isn’t so much the song itself that leaves the final impression but the way the song ends.

The final statement made for any particular song comes down to how you close out. Those last moments can prove to be integral to making a song live forever in a person’s mind. One of the things Dormant Ordeal demonstrate time and time again across Tooth And Nail is that one thing is certain: they know how to end a song.

Photos by Piotr Dzik

It is a crazed idea, focusing so much on the finality toward which a song is hurtling, and yet that very finality seems to be a recurring theme on Tooth And Nail, with every song barreling forward into a final conflagration, those last few moments when the band scorch the entirety of a song’s existence into nothingness and cast its ashes into the sea. Tooth And Nail is a story of erecting new towers over and over, only to annihilate the very foundation underneath just to watch them collapse, as the final sendoff and closing seal that fully implants the song in the listener’s head.

That doesn’t mean Dormant Ordeal‘s fourth full-length is obsessed with the end of everything, even given the nihilistic arc that has carried them from album to album, but only that they are masterfully good at creating finales that help ensure their songs will stick around with you long after you’ve traveled far into the following track. Tall order too, since Tooth And Nail is also an album of some of the most relentless and the most atmospheric material that Dormant Ordeal‘s particular brand of tightly controlled whirlwind chaos has been bent into shape for to date.

A couple of questions bound themselves like threads of doubt around the throat of Dormant Ordeal‘s newest album before people heard it, though the band dealt with both of them in expert fashion. The first is that this is Dormant Ordeal‘s first release without founding drummer Radek Kowal, who left the band in 2023 and cast Dormant Ordeal as a two-piece since the release of their previous album. The second is that said previous album, The Grand Scheme Of Things, is an immense fucker of a record to try and top. To this day, it is an album so easily and breathlessly recommended that any opportunity to espouse its virtues to listeners is one that needs to be taken – including now, by the way.

So how then does one navigate these new narratives that have sprung up in time for the group’s first Willowtip Records release? First, and brilliantly inspired, Dormant Ordeal recruited monstrously impressive drummer Chason Westmoreland to turn in one of the most relentless performances put to disc for the band so far. And second, you just don’t try to top the previous album. Instead, you write a disc that stands on equal footing with it yet is somehow far more atmospheric and way more dour in mood than The Grand Scheme Of Things, near-total decimation allowed for, which surprisingly enough still finds Dormant Ordeal well within their comfort/derangement zone.

They begin Tooth And Nail with something they haven’t done in a long time, which is to start with a separate mood-setter intro track, here in the shape of “Wije i Mary, Pt. 1”. They use the “Wije i Mary” pieces to build the framework of Tooth And Nail, as “Pt.2” closes the album out, but we’ll make an effort to dive into that part later. Where the actual teeth of the new album are bared is immediately following, in the fiery bombing runs of the “Halo Of Bones”.

“Halo Of Bones” was an early single for Tooth And Nail so there’s a decent chance you may have crossed paths with it if you’re a spectre who wanders these hallowed halls. If you haven’t, it makes for a great introduction to how the duo of Maciej Niescioruk and Maciej Proficz plan to grind up the cities laid out in front of them.

It isn’t shocking either that even with a four-year gap “Halo of Bones” takes an ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ approach, and it is one of the most recognizably Dormant Ordeal-esque songs out there, fusing a special sort of precise hellstorm of guitar parts, blasting drums, and long drawn-out yet percussive growling to make for an inferno of a song.

It is also one of the early thread-weavers of how Dormant Ordeal seriously consider ending each song, as the final detonation that takes place a hair past the three-minute-and-forty-second mark seems as if the group want each song to sheer itself down to the its calcified bits by the time it ends. Few of the songs on Tooth And Nail ever fade out, instead choosing more to accelerate themselves off the side of a highway overpass each time.

A fun thought exercise in approaching albums is to ask which song is worth the price of admission. If someone were to ask you to eliminate all the other songs, which one in your mind would be the one (if there is one) where you’d still pay for the whole album just to have that particular track? Where is that moment when an album justifies its existence and all the time it asks of you?

This is a little easier with Tooth And Nail given the overall quality of the music and the fact that it’s a seven-song album – and a surprisingly dense seven songs – with an intriguing framework wrapped up around it. The strength of some of the potential candidates for our album’s philosophical decimation is undeniable though, and the one song that has consistently felt worth the price of admission over and over again with an unwillingness to remove its hands from crushing your skull is the album’s fourth track “Orphans”.

“Orphans” is an apocalyptic work of art planted right in the center of an already intense blast of music. “Halo of Bones” has Dormant Ordeal firmly reminding people of the sort of imperial prowess that their guitar work can have and how well they straddle the line between a small handful of death metal subgenres, and its follower “Horse Eater” is as intricate and interwoven as the previous song.

By the time you reach “Orphans”, you’ve been in a ten-minute block of having your head next to a raging furnace and Dormant Ordeal‘s response is then to unleash one of the most chaotic and heaviest songs on the album – and yes, one that also has a head-turner of a guitar groove in its ending segment before immersing itself in its final chorus.

The musical tornado that is “Orphans” has been one of the most consistently returned-to songs on Tooth And Nail, and also because it is the final crashing wave before Dormant Ordeal get really ambitious with longer songs, like its follower “Solvent” – which we premiered right over here.

The difficulty in reviewing a disc like Tooth and Nail is that it is very easy to just let things go the way of a song-by-song writeup. There’s something to latch onto in every song on this album. But we would be remiss in not saying something about how Dormant Ordeal decided to close this album out. If it wasn’t clear by “Solvent”, the back half of Tooth and Nail is where the pair decide to unleash all of the longer songs on this release, with three of the four hanging out at around the seven-minute-plus mark. How they manage to compress so many ideas across three songs and yet still have each one sound so expansive is an impressive act.

The constant air raid of the guitar in the opening segment of the absolutely vicious “The Dying Of The Light” leaves the song with musical war scars, soaring above the titanic amount of music underneath. It’s a point we’ve hammered on earlier here, but it still needs to be restated: It just never seems like the drums take a ‘break’ on this album, serving instead as a constant backbone of double-bass work and blasting to make the band sound as frenetic as possible, even when they’re at their most atmospheric, as in the finality of the album, “Everything That Isn’t Silence Is Trivial”.

Another seven-minute song that is at times as progressive-death as it is overwhelmingly intense, “Everything That Isn’t Silence is Trivial” is also the sort of song that serves as the final summation of an album. It is close to being one of the longest songs on this release but also reprises quite a few of the ideas that “Solvent” had laid out on the table earlier on. In between the titantic mass of music and the tectonic shifts of each part, you’ll notice quiet guitar motifs being snuck in just over the top of each segment, like a trapped beast still managing to reach past the increasing barrier in front of it.

This is already a song that benefits from having its siblings lay out the pathway of a final thunderstorm, and it is the blackened sky that provides the final send-off. It isn’t as relentlessly heavy as some of its predecessors but the amount of time that Dormant Ordeal take with each particular segment and how well they manage to stretch each part out to then tie it around the waist of the following bit means it is equally suffocating.

You could easily get lost in this song alone on multiple repeats as it crashes over you repeatedly. At a certain point, parts of each song just become a massive whole that envelops the world. “Everything That Isn’t Silence Is Trivial” is even amplified by the closing movement of “Wije It Mary, pt 2”, which echoes some of the main guitar melodies for a final three-minute instrumental that, yes, finally fades out the album as a whole.

There are definitely arguments to be had over the ‘best’ overall song on Tooth and Nail, especially when you have so many candidates, but the way Dormant Ordeal chose to close this release is the best way they could’ve done so. Outside of the few brief breaks for echoing guitar melody throughout this album, Tooth and Nail is like having a cliff wall collapse over top of you for about forty minutes. It is a relentlessly intense experience, and mournful at times, isolating in its aural suffocation and immense in its movements. It is a release that has been well worth the four-year wait between albums, and even with the lineup changes the band has seen it still stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the albums before it. Dormant Ordeal have another titanic monster of an album on their hands that will be well worth yelling at people to listen to for a long time.

https://willowtip.com/bands/details/dormant-ordeal.aspx
https://dormantordeal.bandcamp.com/album/tooth-and-nail

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