(written by Islander)
As you can see, we are about to premiere an album by a group named Final Self. They are a death metal band from Tarnów, Poland, and Liturgy of The Final Self is their debut release.
Ee don’t have a lot of information to share about the band or what inspired them. Their very brief description of the music calls it “raw, dark death metal focused on intense atmosphere, existential themes, and destruction from within.” Beyond that, we have the identity of the band’s members and some notes about their resumes:
Eveq – guitar, bass (Breathe The Void, ex-Ingenium)
Ataman Tolovy – vocals (Turin Turambar, Genius Ultor, Mrome, ex-Stillborn, ex-Kult Mogił)
Krzysztof Klingbein – drums (Totenmesse, Belphegor live, ex-Vader live)
At least some of the names in those parenthetical notes will probably perk up the ears of our visitors, as they did mine. Yet for the most part we have to let the music speak for Final Self and what they’re about.
The album consists of eight tracks, lasting a total of about 33 minutes. Many musicians would think carefully (and perhaps agonize internally) about which song to place in the first position on their debut release, because impatient listeners might only give the record that one chance before deciding whether to keep going or move on. The impatient among us might view the first track, rightly or wrongly, as defining the core sound of a band who haven’t previously disclosed their musical influences and stylistic attributes.
Final Self lead off with “The Inheritance of Flame“, and listening to it is like being thrown into the midst of a violent storm without any warning — and then just as suddenly being hurled into other dimensions.
Some of you (most of you?) know that Krzysztof Klingbein is a very talented drummer, and he’s a vital force in creating the song’s initial storming onslaught, blasting away with near-inhuman speed and injecting electrifying fills with equal alacrity. Likewise, the riffing is fast and wild, generating an engulfing mass of savagery that both maniacally roils and rapidly veers off in sudden angles, and the bass-work is equally fleet of finger.
But as previewed above, the song becomes a head-spinning cavalcade of changes that announce themselves quickly and then shift again just as suddenly. The pace constantly slows and then accelerates; the drumming settles into short patterns that sound proggy or jazzy and also generates quirky and seemingly off-kilter counterpoints to what’s happening with the fretwork, in addition to furiously firing like an automatic weapon.
Speaking of what’s happening around the drumwork, the riffing is a musical chameleon. It strangely squirms, feverishly shivers, manically throbs, and creates a multitude of bizarre note-angles. And yet there is clearly a method to this madness, a structure within this chaos, because somehow each of those strange and often dissonant motifs turns out to be a hook. They change as fast as a top spins, but you already have them stuck in your head when they recur, even if you didn’t realize that.
Meanwhile, the vocals are scary as hell, creating their own cavalcade — a cavalcade of gritty gutturals, imperious roars, rabid snarls, and hair-raising screams. And further meanwhile, the heavily growling and thankfully noticeable bass moves swiftly on its own, enhancing the song’s head-spinning impact.
As a first exposure to Final Self, “The Inheritance of Flame” should pop open the eyes of most extreme-metal listeners. It demonstrates über-impressive technical chops, relentless songwriting dynamism, and a flair for creating an experience that simultaneously feels both insane and machine-precise.
The song does reveal many of the core qualities of the album as a whole — those qualities just identified in the preceding paragraph. But it doesn’t reveal all of them.
For example, in the midst of all the jaw-dropping and generally deranged flurries and contortions, the band also occasionally drop slower-paced episodes of groaning bleakness and suffocating oppressiveness — tendrils of melody that are as blood-congealing as the more high-speed exercises are blood-rushing.
Or they might launch an eerily slithering, frantically quivering, and jubilantly spiraling guitar solo. Or they might give you a quick chance to bang your addled head. (All these things happen in just the second song, “The Paradox of Eternally Becoming a God“.)
Although the songs might spark genre definitions of something like “avant-garde tech-death”, they’re all mood-changers too, moving among moods just as fast as they shift among instrumental patterns.
And it bears repeating the seeming paradox, which was true not just of the first song but of all of them, that despite how fast-changing and truly alien the musical motifs are, they turn out to be “sticky”, and the songs all turn out to be well-plotted, even if it’s a bit confounding to imagine how they were conceived or executed.
It also bears repeating that the vocals are bestial, demonic, and scary as hell. It also becomes apparent that Krzysztof Klingbein enjoyed a lot of creative freedom to do whatever occurred to him that might complement or contrast with the madhouse-and-slaughterhouse fretwork. It’s worth more than one listen to the album just to focus on what he’s doing, which is far more than keeping time or administering accelerated beatings.
I should also be clear that I haven’t mentioned all of the surprises that Final Self throw into the mix — such as the moaning strings and moodily jazzy piano melody that unexpectedly surfaces in “Forlorn Forever Forgotten“, or the moments of dismal singing in that same song.
But hell, they won’t be surprises if I spoil all of them, will they? So I should just stop now and turn you over to the album, which, as a whole, is one of the most surprising, out-of-left field records I’ve heard in a good long while.
Liturgy of the Final Self is being released today through Bandcamp, on CD and digital formats.
P.S. At this point Final Self don’t have a label, don’t have a PR apparatus, don’t have social media. So tell your more adventurous friends about them! It would be a crime for this album to go unnoticed.
PRE-ORDER:
https://finalself.bandcamp.com/album/liturgy-of-the-final-self