Review Summary: Deleted scenes from machine isolation.
This statement may be a bit sweeping considering my limited understanding of their discography, but from what limited bits I have gleaned from them The Axis of Perdition have carved a rather unique niche within this side of dissonance-influenced black metal (not to say Axis falls neatly within the disso-black genre itself, however). That niche is something of horror with a whole lot less cheese than we oft find, shooting instead for the surreal and cold isolation of defunct machinery and lightless lifeless factories, with all the ambient sounds of grinding gears and the fleeting buzz of electrical pulses as the only sounds traversing the dust-addled still air that encompasses vast swaths of concrete and weakened beams. A factory that is not functioning is a more frightening environment than it deserves to be, perhaps due to the factory as a testament to the unnatural. It is after all a lifeless form with a million mechanisms colliding in tandem to ensure its function, much of which is captured sonically off of
Apertures.
This record is for sure a little less focused on aspects of isolation than their opus
Deleted Scenes From Transition Hospital, but whether it be through intermissions of grinding steel, distant howls permeating the nuanced guitar wizardry this album exudes or plodding water drips from cracked piping. “Corrupted Pulse” is an electric introduction in the most literal of senses, with the sound of clipped power lines being jolting and abrasive, perfectly serving as both a kinetic charge and a shocking contrast to the dismal mustiness that “Metempsychosis” gives rise to. This is where Axis’s amazing propensity to intertwine melody and dissonance into a singular dance where one contorts the other, as we are introduced to riffs that are inharmonious, dizzying and chaotic, and yet flourishes of melody still shine through albeit hardly brightly, as the oddly sinister outro to “Metempsychosis” and the intro to “Chants of the Worshipful Prey” do well to represent. This harrowing cornucopia of unwieldy melodic bits, jarring atonal riffs and abrasive metallic noises of
something come to a wicked head with “Private Acts of Abnegation”, with percussion that serves as a reliable bedrock to plod it all along, all the while having its own complex flourishes that never threaten to overthrow the shadowy ambiance at large. A similar concept can be applied to the vocals, which consist almost entirely of ugly, fierce (but not -too- fierce) rasps and utterances that are a tool in the arsenal upon which this mechanical ritual is crafted.
In the end we are brought to “I Am Odium”, perhaps the track that veers the furthest from mechanicalness and atonality, albeit not without sounding isolated and harrowing in its own right. While it accomplishes a rigid structure through backing gas-leak whistling faintly heard through staccato discordant chug patterns and some, ahem, sick as *** hi-hat patterns, there is a flicker of joy and beauty that crops up through the surprisingly beautiful melodies that sneak their way out of the mire. It’s a magnificent thing to behold, that a record so immersed in being abstract and fearsome could manage something that comes close, albeit not quite there, to being holistic. In this I applaud
Apertures, for while it is quite obvious that Axis tends well the haunt they desire to maintain, they are not entirely confined to any limiting structure and can thread together many means to a still hypnotic and frightening end.