Locrian
Return To Annihilation

For once, I cannot put into words the images that flash through my mind while listening to this album. It's as if the thick fog on the cover seeps into my eyes, as if it penetrates every fiber of my clothing, making them heavy and damp, as if it seeps into my brain through the headphones, preventing it from thinking. This album brings you to your knees, annihilates you, suffocates you, imprisons and enthralls you, and you can't escape, as you find yourself repeatedly pressing the "play" button every time you finish listening, just for the sake of being annihilated again.

The music here is stripped down, lost in a medley where black metal, noise, ambient, post-rock, and drone coexist, moving along, consuming and biting each other, blending into one another endlessly, with melody succumbing to noise, gaining strength for a few moments only to be swept away again by piercing screams. The beauty of this album is that you can't explain it, you never know what the next minute might be like, it makes you lose yourself to the point where you reach a point in a song, completely dazed, able to lift your head from the fog you breathe for a moment to ask yourself how the hell you got there, what came before, what on earth you heard just a second before... But by the time you finish this thought, the fog has already enveloped you again, and you start all over. Like that shopping cart on the cover, lost in a concrete parking lot, you feel abandoned, parked in nothingness: there are silhouettes in the distance, maybe streetlights, but their light is so dim it's as if they're not there, and in the distance, you only hear the wind and a lugubrious clatter, the weeping of guitars tortured to the sad rhythm of a delicately touched piano.

The pinnacle of bewilderment is reached, however, as it should be for every worthwhile journey, towards the end of the album, when even Floydian echoes emerge from the fog (I might be crazy, but in "Obsolete Elegies" I hear a bit of "Absolutely Curtains," a bit of the sanctity of "A Saucerful Of Secrets," and who knows what else), and the melody rises in all its power, only to be lost in nothingness that, obviously when you least expect it, delivers the final blow, a black explosion guided by a dramatic and epic guitar, of incredible intensity, which so reminds me of the highest moments touched by bands like Agalloch or Austere (the first ones that popped into my head). And then everything collapses on itself and closes, this time for good: an enormous black drape falls over our eyes, and one is almost compelled, as mentioned a few lines above, to press "play" again, to try and make sense of it all.

"Return to Annihilation" cannot be explained, it just needs to be listened to: the Locrian have created a metropolitan nightmare capable of regenerating itself every time you listen to the album, a profoundly intense and atmospheric work, transcending the reference genre but unique in the sensations it conveys, an album of "extreme" something that must absolutely not go unnoticed.