(written by Islander)
Gaze upon the daunting cover art above for Locus Damnatorum, the debut album from the diabolical Slovakian band Goholor — whose name is an Enochian word for “ascend” and begin to imagine what primordial terrors it holds in store. The album follows by a decade the band’s debut EP In Saeculis Obscuris, and it seized the attention of the esteemed Personal Records, which will release the album on May 8th.
On behalf of the label, the press materials describe the album’s music by invoking such names as Unanimated, Necrophobic, Sacramentum, Gates of Ishtar, and Sweden’s Sacrilege, and more general references to “black/death’s late ’90s heyday”. They also divulge that the album’s themes “focus on the dark and demonic side of society, such as hypocrisy, perversion, insensitivity, and obsession with religion.”
To delve further into the album’s marauding madness, what we have for you today is the premiere of its second single, “Divine Blood Invocation“.
Violent insanity jubilantly reigns supreme from the first moment of this new song. It erupts in an electrifying burst of nimble-fingered riffing that maniacally writhes, frantically twitches, and ecstatically screams, further propelled by depth-charge bass-rumbles, obliterating blast-beats, and hell-spawned vocals that roar, howl, and shriek.
Goholor maintain both their furious pace and their surgically sharp and technically impressive execution but also go off in other crazed directions. They elevate the riffage in ways that sound even more insane but also more distressed, while backing that with steadier beats. The fretwork creates sonic swarms and spasms across the channels, but the music also seems to imperiously blare and painfully moan while thundering below.
Eventually the pace slows, but no one could breathe much easier then, because the music heavily heaves and groans, as well as miserably quivers, in a way that spawns visions of a staggering monstrosity and its terrified victims. Near the end the band also bring in an eerily writhing melody that seems to elegantly invoke gothic nightmares. It also bears re-emphasizing that the vocals, in all their changing manifestations to match the music’s own changes, are unhinged and terrorizing.
In a nutshell, this is a very impressive and incessantly gripping experience, one that’s exhilarating and frightening, intricate and insane, in equal measure.
GOHOLOR is:
Demo (guitars/screams)
Anton (growls)
Pio (drums)
Erik (bass)
Locus Damnatorum was mixed and mastered by the veteran Tore Stjerna at Necromorbus Studios. Personal Records will release it internationally on CD and digital formats. See the link below for pre-orders, and then after the link partake of the previously released opening track from the album, “Demonical Redemption“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/locus-damnatorum
GOHOLOR:
https://goholor1.bandcamp.com/album/in-saeculis-obscuris