(written by Islander)
Visitant is an excellent name. Unlike the more mundane “visitor”, it suggests the appearance of something uncommon, something supernatural and possibly dangerous, like an apparitional visitation from the spirit world. That idea is reinforced by the striking red-hued cover image on this U.S. band’s debut album Rubidium.
True to the name they chose, Visitant‘s music turns out to be uncommon as well, a changing braid of varying genre ingredients that creates altered and interwoven sensations — sensations haunting and harrowing, disconsolate and vengeful, diaphanous and pulverizing, and altogether head-spinning.
You’ll get an idea of just how variable those ingredients are when you see the “for fans of” references provided by Visitant‘s label Exitus Stratagem Records: Gojira, Opeth, Naglfar, Between the Buried And Me, Enslaved, Dimmu Borgir, Mgła, Leaves Eyes, and Chelsea Wolfe.
Of course, not all those allusions become relevant within each song on Rubidium. The weave tends to change from song to song. The one from the album we’re focused on today is “Starless“, presented through a gripping lyric video made by Motus Insaniam.
Visitant‘s Rubidium reflects the work of the group’s two founding members, guitarist Taylor Tidwell (Unaligned) and vocalist Chelsea Marrow (Voraath), and their bandmates Anthony Lusk-Simone (drums/orchestration) from Abiotic and Lattermath, and Kilian Duarte (bass) from Abiotic and Scale the Summit, the first two based in Florida and the other half in Massachusetts.
We have some more details to share about Visitant and their new album, but we ought to get to “Starless” first. Here is what Chelsea says about it:
“Starless” lyrically is about self-preservation and protection, in a way. It embraces dark femininity. It’s about burying the darkest parts of you, letting them fester and unleashing it unto all who have hurt you while building walls shutting out the world. It evokes the embodiment of wrath and vengeance. It speaks from grief in the angry stage. It’s probably the darkest song on this album, I feel.
“Starless” was another song that was musically born in a very organic way. It was made during a writing session, and we pretty much wrote the bulk of the song at one time. This one we wanted it to be in your face and heavy, and compelling. The song was born naturally, and we think you can hear that in the song. This one, too, has a very bleak and somber atmosphere to it. We wanted to convey the pain.
Visitant introduce the song with subdued classical strings and rippling piano keys which together create a sorrowful but entrancing mood. The gentle nature of that overture makes the sudden crash that follows it even more startling — a sudden attack of slashing and sizzling fretwork, gargantuan bass-moans, neck-cracking beats, savage roars, and scorching screams.
The song continues to bring in classically influenced piano melodies coupled with vividly dancing guitars, creating an almost diabolical kind of elegance, but the song also ignites a blackened firestorm of blasting drums, delirious fretwork, and sweeping symphonics. The notes vibrantly dart and blaze as the rhythm section thunder, and the music both elevates to heights of daunting, haughty grandeur and sweeps like wildfire.
The torrid and tormented vocals seem to hold nothing back, howling and screaming out on the bleeding edge of intensity, and as if the song couldn’t get any more extravagant, the band make room for a head-spinning guitar solo at the end, in the midst of lots of other equally head-spinning fretwork and rhythm-section spectacles.
“Starless” is the album’s second single. The first one, “Fodder“, presents different warps and wefts in its weave. Also presented through a video (this time we get to see the band perform), it was inspired by a very dark dream in which Chelsea attempted to bring a murdered friend back to life and lost her own life in the process, leaving the friend trapped in a hellish limbo, bound to a body over which their control had been lost to dark spirits. (In the real world, the friend had taken his own life years earlier.) She also says:
Musically, this song is so powerful. I feel like this captures our abilities so well, which is why we chose this as our first single. It’s just hard-hitting from the get-go, but still so melodic and feral. Musically, “Fodder” is a song that comes out swinging from the gate, heavy, punchy, dissonant, and groove-driven driven all the while retaining melody and a hook.
To be sure, this song is also musically extravagant. It features a lot of borderline deranged and technically demanding high-speed maneuvers (a tour de force that would make lots of tech-death bands jealous) but it’s also hallucinatory, and unhinged in many other respects. It further demonstrates that Chelsea Marrow can really sing, as well as howl like a wolf and scream like a goblin.
It’s a highly theatrical experience, but also instrumentally kaleidoscopic and viscerally frightening, and the singing makes the song stand out as much as every other demented and dazzling aspect of it.
Rubidium includes five more songs besides these two, with a total run-time of about 33 minutes. It was produced and mixed by Tony Lusk-Simone and mastered by Jason Fisher. It will be released by Exitus Stratagem Records on August 22nd.
PRE-SAVE:
https://hypeddit.com/visitant/rubidium
VISITANT:
https://www.facebook.com/visitantband
https://www.instagram.com/visitiantband
https://visitant1.bandcamp.com/track/dematerialization
EXITUS STRATEGEM:
https://www.exsrmusic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ExSRecords
https://www.instagram.com/exsrmusic