(written by Islander)
Shades of mental and emotional darkness have been features of heavy metal in general, and extreme metal in particular, for a very long time. Sometimes it’s been represented through supernatural imagery and lyricism, sometimes by more direct experiences of real-world turmoil and desolation.
But while it’s commonplace to see descriptions of metal songs or albums as “dark”, it’s still startling (and shuddering) to read about the ethos of Litosth’s forthcoming fourth full-length, Dreaming. It is described in the press materials proffered by Personal Records as a record that “offers no comfort, no resolution, no redemption”:
“What it offers is something more disturbing and necessary: the complete architecture of collapse. Eight tracks that do not describe the fall — they are the fall…. The album descends layer by layer through what remains when everything that was imposed is stripped away: faith, morality, purpose, and the illusion of ascent. What remains is not liberation. It is only ashes, emptiness, and silence…. Dreaming is not a record about dreaming. It is about finally ceasing to do so.”
How does this Brazilian duo of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Maicon Ristow and lyricist Wendel Siota plumb such desolate depths through their music? We have a partial answer today in our premiere of a guitar-and-bass playthrough video for the song “Eclipse“.
While it’s our understanding that Ristow performed all the instruments on the album, he is joined in the video by two other performers, including lead guitarist Felipe Nienow, and it is engrossing to watch what they do as the song unfolds.
Of course, we can also hear other musical ingredients besides those being rendered in this live performance — drums that strikingly boom and batter, synth layers that elevate the song to even greater heights and broader expanses of distress, and truly shattering vocals.
And yes it’s a distressing song, and a powerfully gripping one of many layers. The opening moments establish an extremely anguished and hopeless melody even before the drums begin to momentously pound and the bass begins to throb, and then the performers elevate that melody to precarious heights.
As the song continues to build in intensity, it also includes feverishly pulsating riffs, searing lead-guitar emanations, blast-beat fusillades, and broad swaths of trem-picked anguish and sweeping grandeur that help propel it to stunningly tragic heights.
The music also descends into gloomier depths just before the appearance of a ringing guitar melody that’s elegant and ethereal — a rather mesmerizing interlude before the music soars, sears, and blasts again. At the end, the music both swells with symphonic power and fades away through the channel of a grieving piano melody.
We haven’t tried to put a genre label on Listoth’s new music – because it really is a hybrid, a kind of alchemical interaction of black metal, death metal, doom, and symphonic metal. It manages to be atmospheric and also muscle-moving, raging and remorseful, and altogether captivating and memorable.
Personal Records will release Dreaming on July 24th internationally, on CD and digital formats. You can pre-order now via the links below. And below the links we’ve included the album’s first single, the closing song “Golgota“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.personal-records.com/product/pre-order-litosth-dreaming-cd/
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/dreaming
FOLLOW LITOSTH:
https://www.facebook.com/litosthofficial