Review Summary: The black metal rainbow
What invokes
your spiritual anguish? Mistreatment from ostensibly graceful institutions? Feeling born into a body incongruous with your mind? Dealing with weirdos online who keep bickering about sub-genres when you just wanna fuckin’
riff? If you've checked any of those boxes, then there's a good chance that—just like their namesake—Eudaemon have what it takes to act as your guardian presence; the Minnesotan quartet, variously describing themselves as “blackened screamo,” “emotional bm,” or “[reclaimed slur] metal,” have slowly made a name for themselves since the start of the decade, organizing and performing at queer-friendly underground gigs across the Midwest. For the past three or four years now, irreverent social media posts, walk-the-walk leftism, and whack-a-mole genre discourse (everyone’s favorite!) have become synonymous with the band’s small but entertaining online brand. And now that any bigots among us have clicked back to the homepage [fingers crossed], their music’s pretty damn dope, too. At the cusp of really making a name for themselves, this debut LP,
Spiritual Anguish, flexes Eudaemon’s quality control, replay value, and unburdened confidence in spades.
Allow me to peel back those layers: at just shy of 40 minutes, 6 tracks, and a nearly 50/50 split between re-recorded demos and completely new material, the group is neither overambitious nor needlessly trepidatious about their first full-length offering, tightly condensing the hallmarks of their sonic DNA into a select few compositions that take advantage of cohesion, contrast, tension, and release. The sullen, descending arpeggios of opener “Karst,” for instance, appear to pledge allegiance to gloomy post-rock/skramz giants like Envy or City of Caterpillar, but false alarm! Witness the Blast beats! Fry vocals! Sudden tempo acceleration! And then it flickers back to the original crawl. Fake-out ending? Liturgy-adjacent climax? All that and more!
And it’s only track one?
Moving on: “Possession Audition” sandwiches a short barn- and/or church-burner between two relatively inconsequential spoken word samples. Meridian Shanewood’s bass tone at the end of “Empty Hallways” almost borders on synthlike and is one of the coolest sounds I’ve heard this year. “Silt” plays a dissonant deathy motif to post-punk-ish ends, while “Basalt” and the back half of 12-minute closer “In Mirrors” exemplify a knack for not just clean melodies, but atypically (for this genre, anyway) beautiful
harmonies by guitarist/vocalists Mirii Landsem and Ella Smith. Each track is dynamic and organic, coalescing the amalgam of extraneous influences to a broadly appealing and whiplash-averse overall palette. The result is a largely gimmick-free tour-de-force of versatile riffs, impeccable rhythm work (Peter Korhonen,
hellooooo sir), and punchy deliveries.
That refinement and restraint may in fact be the thing that puts
Spiritual Anguish on a less secretive map, even if it complicates the easier narrative that Eudaemon make music for and about transness, self-reflection, and uhhhhhhh geology? “None of us are geology people tho,” Landsem denies at one point in our correspondence — could’ve fooled me with lyrics like
“I am stone. I am rock. We will become rock.” — that is, of course, if we’re to take any of the simplicity there at face value. Whether the metaphors reflect a chronic struggle with the ol’ flesh prison or some higher frustration beyond that, all the hearsay you could heave against Eudaemon falls a few feet short of the distance this first album of theirs treads. Trade the corny rock talk for a few more “In Mirrors” and a bona fide classic could be waiting in the wings.
“My purpose is ahead,” that track declares. I’ll toast to that this Pride Month — and
Spiritual Anguish doesn’t seem poised to leave my rotation as soon as the calendar hits July, either.
