(written by Islander)
This makes the lucky 13th time we’ve written about the music of Veilburner (beginning 11 years ago), and the 7th time we’ve premiered their music — that’s a lot of prime numbers! Which is fitting because this is a prime band, their music not easily divisible into conventional component parts but instead twisting and looping back onto itself much like the ever-feeding Ouroboros that the band favor in their symbolism.
The subject of today’s premiere is “Matter o’ the Most Awful of Martyrs,” the third song to be revealed from Veilburner’s new album Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy, which will be released on November 14th by Transcending Obscurity Records.
Transcending Obscurity has provided a linguistically lavish and opulently occult description of the new album (one detects the hand of Veilburner in the wording), and we’ll share that in full a bit later, but for now we’d like to focus on the song you’re about to hear from this wickedly warped Pennsylvania duo of Mephisto Deleterio and Chrisom Infernium.
Veilburner don’t trifle with short-form releases. Their 8 records so far have all been albums. They don’t trifle with the straight and narrow in their songwriting either, preferring the unpredictable and the apparently macabre (though it’s equally apparent there’s always an ingenious method to their madness).
There is in fact a through-line within the song you’re about to hear, albeit a line that slithers and squiggles. Announced at the outset, that line dismally and caustically clangs but also eerily and ethereally wails, creating a strange and unsettling pulse. It persists even when horrid howls, battering-ram blows, and bursting fusillades ensue — and then Veilburner begin contorting that line into bizarre but exhilarating new forms.
The riffing continues to carry that vivid pulse, both filthy and ringing in tone, but intensifies it. They create a different and more demented pulse, and then cause the pulse to catch a delirious fever. The bass drives a pulse too, but it’s a bowel-loosening one.
Meanwhile, like the hooves of their spiked and skeletal steed on the cover, the drums hammer the cobblestones in varying cadences — galloping, cantering, and also skittering about in ways no horse (alive or reanimated) could accomplish.
It’s fair to say that the vocals are the song’s most diabolical feature. One might think of fanatical and disgusted gargoyles and goblins with bulging necks enclosed by spiked collars (spikes facing inward) that continually tighten to effect strangling intensity, but occasionally loosen enough to permit woozy lunatic wails.
The most enticing (and also surprising) feature of the band’s musical adaptations arrives with little more than a minute left, time enough for a guitar solo to come in over a big clanging groove and below quivering stratospheric radiations, a solo that’s fluid but also fast, jubilant and engrossing, somewhat proggy and somewhat jazzy and quite captivating.
And now here’s the promised description of the album mentioned above:
In the spirit of striking while the iron is hot, this eighth evolution of the Veilburner story capitalizes on momentum while simultaneously achieving new heights in their song-crafting and story-telling. It leads their characters on a journey in which they cannot recognize triumph without tragedy, and sees them residing somewhere between the abyss and their devotion to mortal re-occurrence, that which seems to attract death.
They face not just any death, but the kind in which they are bound to an infinite loop of reincarnation and destined to repeat the same traumas and failures as before. They continue to suffer like two dragons consuming one another in a serpentine-like fashion until one can no longer consume the other, frozen in the shape of infinity (∞) and numerologically represented by the digit eight (8).
Samael (the “poison of god” and the eighth sphere of the Qlippoth), as well as Choronzon (the dweller of the threshold) and the Ouroboros all correlate with this symbol of infinity and exist in Veilburner’s lore as the antagonistic and immutable eternity, which if confronted can lead to self-destruction and the finality of manifestation, permanently breaking the loop.
Mephisto’s discordant cacophony of dripping notes and riff-filled rot remain foul as ever, yet undeniably addictive. The music twists and turns on itself in an auditory embodiment of the album’s theme and takes the listener on a snaking, bending musical roller coaster that seemingly ends at the precipice of where it began, endlessly inviting another listen.
Chrisom Infernium acts as a medium, casting shadows of hiss filled hymns that harken to the past call to the present channeling the chatter of choired cataclysms, creating doppelgängers of sonic dispersions which leave the listener to contemplate if they are willing to confront the thing they fear most, the true version of themselves.
As usual, Transcending Obscurity will release the album on a variety of formats and with a variety of related merch, all of it featuring the fascinating cover art by Luciana Nedelea. They recommend it for fans of – Blut aus Nord, Imperial Triumphant, Deathspell Omega, Hexrot, Oranssi Pazuzu, Akhyls, and Akercocke.
Below you’ll find links for more info, as well as streams of two other songs from the album, “That Which Crypts Howls Grandeur” and “Da’ath Ye Shadow Portrait.”
PRE-ORDER:
https://veilburnerband.bandcamp.com/album/longing-for-triumph-reeking-of-tragedy
http://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
http://eu.tometal.com/
VEILBURNER:
https://facebook.com/veilburner
https://instagram.com/veilburner_official