Review Summary: Although bit lacking, the album is still an unsettling listen.
I like to go through marathons with bands and listen to a band's entire discography from first to last. It's something I've done with most of the bands I listen to and about a year or so ago I attempted to go through GTT's entire discography. It was a very cold winter day and by the time I was done, it had put me in such an unsettled mood that lasted the night and ended up disturbing my sleep and making that whole day a somewhat bad memory. This was because GTT creates a sound that is genuinely disturbing, unsettling and gruesome that it has indeed scared the *** out of me at times.
Now that being said, when I got to the end of this marathon of GTT's discography and got to "Eschatological Scatology" I was somewhat disappointed with the slight shift in style. GTT has always been a purely ambient project, creating "songs" that sounds like the soundtrack to the inside of the mind of a serial killer. I put "songs" in quotes because they never were songs that were meant to be listened to and tap, clap and snap to, but rather the instrumentation, sound bites and vocals are structured into these noise scapes and sound epics, mood music essentially, filled with alot of sound bites and unsettling orchestral arangements meant to put the listener into a disturbed state of mind with all kinds of sound effects to enhance the mood and add to the already unsettling atmosphere. With "E.S" the sound is a bit more conventional, going for more of a black metal style. Here there is actual sound structure and more of a presence of very fuzzy sounding guitars and blast beat drumming. The songs are not so much the noisy epics of previous releases with the black metal influence put more on the front burner and the drone and ambient elements being pulled back a bit. This experiment with the sound to make it more "accesable" (as much as possible anyway) rather than being just utter noise makes the album less moody and less atmospheric. This is why I was disappointed with the release on some level.
Even so, with the overall mood of the album reduced, it still manages to be a genuinely disturbing album. Lyrics, jugding by the song titles, focus on themes of bondage, torture, S&M, dark surrealism, nightmarish scenarios and other forms of fvcked-upery (?) that only appeal to the depraved and disturbed, and all of it laced with the album's obsession with feces. All the generally emotional havoc one would find at any other generally macabre and depraved thought you can think of.
As the album progresses though, one thing becomes very obvious. And this is a general complaint that I have for all of GTT's albums to a lesser or greater extent, and that it, at times, gets a bit campy. This is due mostly to the various sound bites spread throughout the songs of things like women screaming and monologues and other things of that nature, all done in an attempt to create a more "nightmarish" atmosphere and it ends up taking away from the atmosphere that much more. The most evident of this is on the final track "The Atrocious Angel of Scatology" which halfway through contains this female computer programmed voice giving a monologue giving a description of the title character of the song. The monologue includes lines of the Angel descending from the skies "covered in feces" and "hang the saints by their scrotums" and "burn the virgins in the pentacle shaped gardens". Lines like this are not scary, but instead feel like an amateurish attempt to be shocking and disturbing and ends up doing the exact opposite.
Another problem worth mentioning is once again due to the more straight forward metal style, in that it feels less varied and even less unique, instead it feels more restricted and more basic. This at the same time also makes the songs a bit more energetic and bit more accesable and not as thought provoking and not as moody. Overall this album, although still grotesque and still intense, it is not quite as shocking or unsettling as previous releases, and I do contribute this to the more straight forward sound structure. But at its core, this is still a worthwhile listen. And even though it is a bit watered down compared to previous efforts, it's still good overall and I still would recomend it.
(Originally posted on the Metal Archives under username "EschatonOmega")
