Altar Of Plagues
Mammal

At a certain point in your life, you encounter despair, sadness, (it happens to everyone, the wheel turns for each of us, and I'm not throwing it at you, but we all know it's true, even though I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy), and you wonder what noise-music such a feeling could have.

Then you listen to bands like Khanate, Khlyst, Gnaw, Gnaw Their Tongue, etc., and you realize that the sound of the transition itself from life to death has been created, but what about the moment just before? That moment so full of sadness and despair, and resignation and also anger? Well, that's where bands like this Altar Of Plagues come in.

They are Irish, and this is their second studio effort as a trio (their first release, that white tomb, disoriented the minds of those who approached it with heart, mind, and ears to those desolate landscapes), and they propose a black metal outside the normally known canons (as is happening more and more often for many years now - contamination galore - not always successful it must be said), immersing it in contexts not too unusual anymore, like that of post-metal à la Neurosis, drone, ambient, apocalyptic folk, only here, unlike most who venture into such a genre, aptly called post-black metal, the personality and originality of execution are through the roof.

Four long tracks (as also in the aforementioned predecessor), the first almost reaches 20 minutes, "neptune is dead", and it's a triumph of atmospheric black metal shredded by post-apocalyptic blows à la Neurosis, voice pulled to the extreme, funeral cadences, sudden noise bursts, ancestral elevations: Disturbing! Then you move on to the next "feather & bone", and you realize that wasn't all there is, the riffs become sharper, the atmospheres compress, the groove takes hold, always stuffed with folk-like blasts, but with a rage, especially in the almost hardcore use of the voice, absent in the initial track: Apocalyptic! With the third track, "when the sun down in the ocean", everything changes under a cloak of anxiety-inducing and transcendental smoke, the walls of blood shatter, a voice from beyond the grave sings a call to death, a hissing lullaby, almost off-key, then slowly, gives way to a march toward the end with few precedents, the calmest and most ambient track of the lot, as well as the shortest, but not less effective, indeed: Meditative-transcendental indeed! The descent is almost complete, it is up to the concluding "all life converges to some centre" to close the circle, compression point of all that our artists have given so far; all the various facets of the work are called to unite in what is probably the best track of the work, but also of the group's career itself, until in the end, everything elevates to a dramatic level difficult to explain in words, before crashing and shattering into a dark cloak of ambient marked by the beats of percussion that close the work, as if the end had truly come!

Mammal is this, it's a train projected towards the end, laden with despair and tragic malaise, but a light, after that last final percussion, seems to appear: as if to say that not everything is lost, not everything is gone, and that despair, and sadness serve for a decidedly better tomorrow.

As I was saying, the wheel turns!

Mammoth!