(written by Islander)
Just two days into this dreadful new year I found myself mentally knocked flat by the first song revealed from a debut album by the Italian band Dwellnought. Not completely struck dumb by it, because I was able to feverishly peck out a scramble of words soon after hearing it, but stunned anyway. And so what a stroke of good fortune it was to be invited to premiere another song from the album.
This newest song, which you’ll now be able to hear for yourselves, is “Ill Whispers“. The album is Monolith of Ephemerality (a title that will mean something to you when you listen). And the release date through Caligari Records is February 20th.
The album includes five songs. Three of them are longer than average, and “Ill Whispers” is one of those, clocking in at nearly 11 minutes. There’s another one (“The Final Desire Is Unseeing“) that reaches above the 17-minute mark. The three big ones are bookended by songs of more conventional length (but that’s really the only thing about them that’s conventional).
Contrary to what the title “Ill Whispers” may lead you to expect, in this song Dwellnought immediately assault listeners with enormous battering-ram blows, dense swarms of vicious abrasion, and a maniacally clattering snare drum. Simultaneously, it feels like being brutishly stomped, shredded by gunfire, and feverishly fed upon by some hive of terrible creatures. To say the least, that opening seizes attention in explosive fashion.
But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just as rabidly monstrous vocals join in, the pace accelerates and the music undergoes an even more deranged and destructive convulsion — segmented by further doses of traumatic pounding. The lead guitar screams and quivers; the riffing gruesomely gnashes; that snare drum goes wild.
When the band slow down, it’s not to administer aid and comfort. They just stomp slower while the fretted instruments miserably wail and grotesquely groan, and the vocals descend to abyssal depths of cold horror (but also scream like a wraith in the throes of lunacy). It’s really not possible to overstate just how humongously pulverizing this sequence is.
Nor is it possible to overstate just how dismal, diseased, and demented the tremolo’d riffing is when it reappears, or how thunderously heavy and simultaneously eerie the song becomes when Dwellnought kick up the pace again.
The song repeatedly throws listeners off-balance before reaching its end. Without warning the pace changes, the degree and nature of violence changes, the vocals morph into different manifestations of monstrosity, the moods shift from experiences of nightmarish hallucination to flat-out butchery, from visions of skies on fire to being drowned in hideous vats of congealing viscera.
In more prosaic terms, Dwellnought have brought together ingredients of doom, black metal, and brutal death metal to create one of the most horrifying and intensely riveting songs of the year so far. Don’t say you weren’t warned:
I’m also going to include for you a stream of that first song that floored me in early January, one of the other big ones in between the album’s shorter bookends. The song’s name is a long one too: “Crystalized Flesh Identities Condensed Into Wombs of Matter“. To repeat what I wrote upon first being floored:
At the outset, insanity reigns, thanks to wildly clattering drums, wildly writhing riffage that’s scathing in tone, and wild, bestial howls. In the midst of the churning and hammering chaos, weirdly wailing tones slowly spiral up and out, and quiver, like apparitional presences.
The band also slow the pace, but don’t retreat from the overarching aura of madness. The guitars seem to miserably ring like warped chimes and to feverishly shiver through the dense waves of abrasion, while the drums are constantly in flux, sometimes sounding out military cadences, sometimes brutishly pounding, sometimes racing as if on fire.
The song also includes a very strange closing phase. While ethereal tones shimmer in the background (and perhaps choral voices wail), the band combine crackling noise with macabre spoken words, distorted so they sound horrifying as they gasp and bark the words. This phase creates a different kind of nightmarish hallucination to close out a song that’s already hallucinatory in other ways.
Monolith of Ephemerality was recorded in Lonate Pozzolo, Italy, produced by Andrea Collaro in Hangar 121 Studio. Mixing, edits, and sound design by Dwellnought and Andrea Collaro.
PRE-ORDER:
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/monolith-of-ephemerality
https://caligarirecords.storenvy.com/
DWELLNOUGHT:
https://dwellnought.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/dwellnought______