Review Summary: Gotta catch ‘em all.
I love Skin Tension. No really. Why else would anyone sit through their entire discography? Why would anyone sit through an album like the mammoth twenty-seven-hour
Omni? Its soundscape is a portrait of “what the fu
ck?” death metal and blackened dark jazz improv. A band like Skin Tension are for the most devout of listeners, finely tuned for those unhinged enough to
love them. So that’s me, in case you’re wondering.
Prolegomenon is a wild card, slated as a release before the successor to the massive
Omni is released sometime in 2025 but still a relevant foray into some of the weirdest climes found this side of Mitochondrion. I’m hoping for a thirty hour release this time. Please hold my hand? Regardless, Skin Tension are a force to be reckoned with, despite being relative unknowns and underdogs within the avant extreme metal scene. “Black Meteorite” feels like a frenzied portrait with brush strokes stabbed onto the canvas with reckless abandon. The tempo is furious, an up-tempo blasting of snares with sheer intensity as if the zeitgeist behind it is defining its very being. The crawling melody weaves over the tumult—dissonance grows into the atmosphere rather than being a part of it. It’s like Skin Tension is crafting an out of body experience, but for the music instead of the listener. It’s not introspective,
Prolegomenon’s tracks run parallel to such ideals. Instead, “Black Meteorite” teeters and pulls by being abrasive, intelligible and rather inaccessible to what’s considered
normal music. Skin Tension’s avant garde is a beast within itself.
“The Parsonage” is much the same to the point where
Prolegomenon’s opening seamlessness simply
continues, without so much as a pause or a chance to reset. However it’s the feedback laced, “Pristis Zijsron” that really cements this new record as something truly worth listening to. The eerie psychedelic build transforms the breakneck pacing of the record’s first half into a manic storytelling. It’s saying this is the normal half of this journey, it only becomes transformative, wacky and delectably weird from here. It’s here that we experience just why this is called a prequel to next year’s
Omni follow-up.
Prolegomenon stops being a dissonant wanky tech death metal album and becomes something more akin to a brutal prog jerk fest. There’s a sense of profoundness to be found within “Cloud Circuits Collapse” but the twenty-plus minute closer, “Dammam No. 7 Suite” is Skin Tension dialing things up again for the sake of it.
Prolegomenon isn’t “easy listening”. It’s not conventionally beautiful, but it
is undeniably creative and Skin Tension through and through.
