Review Summary: A Blast of Grim Fury
There’s probably nothing more likely to make me avoid an album than the phrase “influenced by
Deathspell Omega” especially when coupled by explicit comparisons to
Krallice. Despite having nothing but respect for
Deathspell Omega, any comparison to those dissonance loving Frenchmen immediately conjures up the image of an album that meanders its way through ten minute snoozefests of dissonant blobs, whereas
Krallice just makes me want to take a nap.
As a result, my expectations for Florida’s Bhavachakra were significantly tempered. By all accounts I was full prepared to be bombarded by another sad example of the bland imitation that is all too common in modern extreme metal, but fortunately Bhavachakra take the idea of dissonant black metal and run with it to a place where
Dodecahedron is just a word for something with 12 flat faces.
Bhavachakra begins with a brief bit of throat singing before promptly transitioning to pleasant acoustics with underpinned percussion. After this soft intro, the album wastes no time getting into the meat of the album. Blisteringly furious instrumentation greets the listener with the dissonance and atonality one might expect from a band who openly claims influence from a collection of more dissonant groups, but Bhavachakra manage to navigate having clear commonalities with their influences with expertise, as the final product is a sound that is decidedly their own. The most surprising aspect found here is how direct the album is. Many tracks clock in at four minutes or less, and as a result they’re never given any room to wander and lose the listener. For nearly every section of more atmospheric dissonance found on this record there is a contrasting sections which hits the listener like a freight train, grinding and crushing with grooves that no so-called experimental black metal group should be allowed to have.
As a result,
Bhavachakra is a surprisingly accessible work, and it's within the ability to attack the listener with driving yet dissonant instrumentation that Bhavachakra are able to succeed on this album. The more atmospheric sections give the work as a whole a well-maintained grim bleakness, but it’s when the band decides to leave the listener slack-jawed with their ability to absolutely melt face that makes the work consistently engaging. Be it the last minute and a half of the eight track “The Diadem of Thought” or the entirety of the album’s masterful closer, the band’s ability to switch from cacophony to skull-hammering groove is stunning. Combine that with vocals that function as a black/death variant of Steeve Hurdle’s vocal style, and you ultimately end up with a final product that stands as a premier example of how to properly incorporate influences from many of the titans of more experimental black metal without sounding like a shameless copy.
