(written by Islander)
In this year-end holiday season many of you are attempting to calm your nerves, to arrange your jumbled thoughts in some orderly fashion conducive to rationality, to find a smidgeon of peaceful reflection in a chaotic world. If so, you’ve come to the wrong place.
You might think instead about being entombed wide awake within a formless coffin, devoid of purpose, transfixed by chaos, bled for eons, your memory fading in clouds of ash, your inner voice becoming a scream, in unreality confined for eternity.
Those words in that last paragraph are drawn from the lyrics of the title song to Ectovoid’s new album In Unreality’s Coffin which we’re premiering today. The remainder of the lyrics are equally nightmarish. So is the music. Find your year-end peace somewhere else.
Band photographs captured live in concert at Saturn Birmingham at the band’s 15th Anniversary Show by Thomas Diasio.
This is the second song premiere we’ve hosted for this new Ectovoid album, the first one being for “Collapsing Spiritual Nebula“. To borrow from what we wrote then:
Although Ectovoid released an EP in 2019 and participated in a four-way split in 2016, more than a decade has passed since their last album, Dark Abstraction. But even with so much time behind them, however, this Alabama band (which features members from Seraphic Entombment and Father Befouled) haven’t musically reinvented themselves — they still have a taste for the bizarre in the midst of their deathly barrages — but their new music is an even more finely calculated, dynamic, and innovative method of unstringing sanity and sinking souls. Today’s new song reinforces that impression.
In line with the song’s lyrical themes, the music is horrifying in more ways than one. The gangrenous dual-guitar riffing maniacally churns and miserably squirms, like festering disease running rampant through flesh that’s incapable of escaping. The drums and bass sound like the victim furiously hammering against coffin walls. The guttural vocals bellow and scream the terrifying words in ways that capture the suffocating oppressiveness and feverish terrors of the experience.
It’s a very heavy and very exhilarating song, but manifests despair as well. The tremolo’d riffing is crazed but also morphs into expressions of dismal misery and frantic hopelessness, and the band find their moments to slug damned hard too. Most crazed of all is the electrifying guitar solo that erupts near the end, a fleet-fingered by utterly berserk fireworks display, and the final moments will leave your muscles twitching.
For damned sure, as proven once again, this new album is going to kick the baby New Year in its ass before it’s even out of the crib.
Recording line-up:
C.B. – Rhythm Guitar/Lead Vocals
R.S. – Bass
C.M. – Drums
C.S. – Rhythm Guitar/Backing Vocals
Current line-up:
C.B. – Rhythm Guitar/Vocals
R.S. – Bass
S.S. – Lead Guitar/Vocals
C.M. – Drums
In Unreality’s Coffin was recorded and engineered by Alex Parra at Second Sight Sound, and it was also mixed by Alex Parra. The mastering was handled by the veteran Dan Lowndes at Resonance Sound Studio. The cover artwork is the work of the great Paulo Girardi.
Everlasting Spew will release the album on January 9th on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and they expect a vinyl edition will be ready by next spring. They recommend it for fans of: Autopsy, Necrot, Incantation, and Acephalix. Pre-order via the links below. Also below, you’ll find that song we previously premiered.
PRE-ORDER:
[MAILORDER] https://bit.ly/4oKN9Rt
[BANDCAMP] https://bit.ly/4i8BWI9
ECTOVOID:
https://www.facebook.com/ectovoid/
https://ectovoid.bandcamp.com/