CTHULUMINATI: “TENTACULA”

(In March of this year the Dutch avant-garde metal band Cthuluminati released Tentacula, a Faustian concept album about Thomas, an illusionist who was granted his power through a most nefarious deal with the ancient deity Tentacula, and Thomas’ subsequent (and unsuccessful) efforts to expose the truth and make amends. Our writer DGR developed a “weird fascination” for the record, and he attempts to explain why in the following review.)

Waste Of Space Orchestra‘s one full-length album Syntheosis came out six years ago, yet I think about it constantly. Syntheosis is an album that I think serves as a prime personal example of being fascinating while at the same time it is so far either ahead of me or just off the beaten path of my musical sphere that I just don’t fully get it. It challenges me on a listening level but at the same time I’m not sure after listening to it that I’ve ever enjoyed myself – yet I am happy that it exists as a reflection of heavy metal’s ambition as well as its mark on the overall art of the genre.

For every painting of recognizable pop art and soup cans, we need our avant-garde weirdos whose ambition far outstrips either the listener’s abilities or the musicians’ own. With no one willing to poke and prod at musical boundaries we’re left with nothing but an already well-laid-out playground and recognizable throughways. Eventually, everything becomes musical suburbia with the same nuclear family and picket fence, with nothing left for us to discuss other than who is fucking who.

The Netherlands gifted us an album of a similar vein a few months back in the form of Cthuluminati and their newest release Tentacula. While far less meditative, psychedelics-obsessed, and psychosis-inducing than the aforementioned art-project (though not by much), I have found that I am weirdly fascinated with Tentacula for much the same reasons.

This is a disc with an ambition far larger than its six-song tracklisting and recognizable Faustian and Lovecraftian mythos would suggest, with twists and turns bordering on the angular and with enough off-kilter moments that even after multiple listens I’m not quite sure how much of it was actually planned and how much of it landed in the realm of happy accident. In some cases I’d even be prone to describing a few moments across Tentacula as outright accidents, were it not for a permeating avant-garde atmosphere that slowly settles itself over the album like a fog.

Does this sound strange enough yet or should we continue further into the realms of the insanely difficult to describe?

There is no music that is fully undescribable but there is definitely a sense of tumbling further and further downward as you struggle for the proper words. Even a genre like “noise” over the years has developed its own lexicon and turns of phrase, so that someone staring at text might be able to transcribe it further into their imaginations and have an idea of what the author is attempting to convey. Cthuluminati by virtue of blending so many different ideas together over the course of Tentacula have made that job tough.

Songs will seemingly head in one direction before taking sharp turns elsewhere, with sudden stops as if roadblocks erected along the path of normal song flow had appeared out of thin air and sections where someone with music experience might be curious why they suddenly charted course in such a different way. Cthuluminati are taking the conventional and making it just bizarre and eerie enough that the parts where they musically should not quite work seem to work out perfectly fine.

This is a river that flows, but we’re not quite sure if its direction is supposed to be vertically upwards like it seems to be. Fitting then, given their inspiration and mythos for the album, that things lie just on the outskirts of the strange. In some ways you wonder if the term avant-garde isn’t being applied because the band are attempting to make something overwhelmingly artistic and boutique but because we lack the regular terminology to otherwise paint a picture of what is happening here.

Save for a quiet instrumental scene-setter to set up the album’s closing climactic acts, Tentacula ranges anywhere between five and ten-and-a-half-minutes per song. Actually, the scale is mostly weighted toward that ten-minute mark with the only five-minute song leading into that scene-setting middle. It opens with two over ten minute songs and closes with two close to ten minute songs, so you can almost hear the odious pendulum of universal equilibrium swaying back and forth to make sure that Cthuluminati keep their program locked in step.

The musical madness starts early in “Cthrl”, with its multi-voiced vocal approach introducing enough unreliable narrators to make you think you’re receiving judgment from the current United States Supreme Court and the music behind them alternating enough that we’re basically one high-voiced sung performance away from Tentacula being painted as a doom and prog-death rock opera. With each new subsection introduced, the song mutates, and not into areas one might traditionally expect. Parts will be injected in as the song changes from death metal, groove-heavy on the toms for tribal flavoring, to something more subtle and meditative.

In fact, it isn’t until deep into “Cthrl” that Cthuluminati let out a hefty roar for the first time. Until then, you’d be safe in assuming you’d stumbled into an immensely ambitious take on the black metal tainted theatrics that Maladie have near-perfected. The artistic bent isn’t even safe from the occasional pun and wordplay song title with “Squid Pro Quo” happily lining up behind it to keep bending a straight-line song over its knee so that the curving becomes immeasurable. You’d hardly pin down that it was the same band if you were to take the first two minutes of each and try to trace the musical arc once Cthuluminati have their musical protagonist firmly set in place.

The same could be said for its back half as well, once Tentacula turns on the pairing of “Abysmal Quatrain” and “Transformation”. The closing epics may be a cat hair shorter than the two introductory numbers but they are no less expansive. Cthuluminati reach beyond doom and black metal influences in “The Illusion Of Control” – a song which is slow to find its footing and is awash with haze before revealing itself to be the next musical nightmare on the plate. Cthuluminati crank hard on the dissonance lever for the guitars as the drumming soldiers on, whether the vocals up front are boisterous or in a high-shriek.

The song opens and closes quietly, as if to cover itself back up after spending six minutes of hammering away at you. The melodic refrain that echoes out into the dark is gorgeous in its own right; you get a sense for how the band might’ve wanted to spend a lot of time in its more somber waters to peel any intensity off layer by layer for a cinematic experience.

Which is why closer “Mantra” may seem like such a big event in that regard to pull the curtains closed on the disc as a whole. The segment that makes up the first half of the song is fascinating, with a constantly repeating guitar line layered over martial drum playing that transitions out of base-hammering and into something more subtly complicated by the four-minute point. “Mantra” is as close to a vocal mantra as the band could land, with its Earth-rumbling hum laying heavy in the throat and buddying up right next a more adventurous Alkaloid at times. “Mantra” is a great closing number that doesn’t have to do the Professor at the lectern yelling “In summation!” act, but gets to end things on its own terms, as Cthuluminati have spent the previous forty-some-odd minutes prepping you for journeys into the land of odd anyway.

And so the post-mortem for Cthuluminati’s Tentacula may well read that it was an album that was fascinating in its strangeness, its approach and subject matter both bizarre and off-axis enough to keep a listener interested by sheer wonderment at what may be coming further down the tracks on this particular train ride. A scant handful of songs for over forty-six minutes of music manages to create an object of strange obsession, a musical Loc-Nar that will inevitably do evil upon its listener but you can’t help but be drawn to it. It is one of the few releases in a while where a simple checklist of “does everything work here” doesn’t quite suffice for a full summation.

Tentacula is a thorny album of bizarre angles befitting its mythos-worshiping subject matter. It is equal parts fun, headbang-worthy, overwhelming, strange, and pervasive. It is an album for the adventurous as any disc with opening narration would suggest, and plenty of mutated wonders abound within the forty-six minutes here. What treasures you walk away with may come down to what you come to the album for in the first place. Are you peering in for the conceptual horror story? Do you just seek strange death metal? Are you reading this review and wondering just what the hell could be so bizarre about a disc like this?

Eventually, you’ll find that letting your guard down and just allowing this one to take you to its many dimensions and odd corners may be the best way to approach it, because then you let Tentacula grow into the weird beast it was meant to be. If you’re willing to let the album breathe and let the analytical side fade from the psyche for a bit, you may well find yourself enjoying the scars left behind on said psyche after a few listens of this release instead.

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