Review Summary: Sick.
Better known for his blackened industrial noise project
Gnaw Their Tongues, the psychotic Dutchman Mories, here under the moniker "M", rapes eardrums and black metal convention alike with side project De Magia Veterum.
From the get-go Mories makes the crux of the album evident. For a man whose earlier work heralds impending loss of genitalia, a pink image of an inverted Christ is relatively tame, but, in combination with the album title, this image is about as subtle as a gun. Mories is adverse to religion, as any black metal musician worth his salt is expected to be, and here strives to create a exceedingly ugly portrayal of matters celestial. The astral nature of the album is notable, and it sounds like heaven is really on fire, and burning fast.
Though DMV (fun acronym, I know) has much more in common sonically with
Blut Aus Nord than Mories' main project, it is shrewdly ebbed to speak of one without the other. While GTT (less amusing) has Mories dropping the thick, black weight of his churning Mordor drone on your face, with DMV he lashes out with a whirlwind of furious and scathingly raw black metal coated with fuzz and fueled by ridiculous blastbeats, more like a hissing teakettle than the boiling blast furnace of GTT. Both, however, create a similar uncomfortable feeling, a paranoid nausea. I hesitate to use the word "atmospheric", since that evokes a far prettier image than Mories creates here, but there is definitely an atmosphere to this album, like a noxious, choking cloud with plenty of lightning, shrieks and high-pitched yelps. Lest you think it repetitive, Mories does slip down out of his high buzz and into low head-nodding chug-rumblings and throaty rambles.
Most surprising is the amount of variation Mories manages to wring from a style so prone to repetition. Flaying tremolo-picking gives way to whiny fret-flitting that in turn sinks into chugging. Frantic buzzing turns to doomy dirge and into the depths of straight drone. "Torn Between Ruins, Faith, and the Divine" opens with a guttural roar befitting OSDM.
M's noise sensibilities still show through the exponentially blackened facade. While not exactly underproduced,
The Divine Antithesis definitely has an overpowering lo-fi quality. The vocals are generally obscured by the nebulous riffs, which even themselves sometimes become a smear. Although
Antithesis is by and large an unrelenting frenetic mass, Mories makes excellent use of the pause. While on first listen they may pass you by, there are sudden and quick breaks where silence reigns for a split second. It seems like a subtle nuance, but the shortest gaps create just enough tension to make the return of noise drop like a pendulous razorblade.
Mories hates Jesus, he hates you, he probably hates this music. He definitely doesn't care what you think. You are simply a lowly witness to his vomiting of sick ire.
