No matter how rotten the State of Denmark ever was, the fecundity of fetidity seems ever more prevalent in the Belgian ward of Ghent; more specifically within the parish boundaries of the Church of Ra, is something far more foul. Missionary for ruinous, dark, and heavy music, six-string dire wolf Lennart Bossu presents a new vehicle to spread the word of power of exacting, challenging, but ultimately rewarding, dark metallic music captured and presented under the guise of Predatory Void, a quintet of local luminaries to Bossu who have helped mould and shape a new, slightly more straight-forward, yet no less demanding than Amenra, force.
Seven Keys To The Discomfort Of Being (Century Media) is not easy listening. It moves and breathes and lives in the spaces of human disconcertions. It provides the soundtrack to murky personal reflections, of personal lows, and contemplations; of struggling to find acceptance of decisions, and psychological procrastination and disappointment. Vocalist Lina R. switches from unbalanced howls, to cautious and vulnerable reflections, swathing words on the nature of who she is, and who we are, in layers of cerebrations.
Seven Keys To The Discomfort Of Being is not easy listening (the album is two minutes old, and we are at our third dark labyrinthine turn… discordant and unsettling Metallic chugging gives way to a sparse quiet, threatening guitar entwining with a clean vocal “So insecure…”), but it is a visceral and visual album, graphic and emotive, but of a person’s (usually internalised) struggles. Images flash of arms wrapped around heads, clothes dirty, rags no less, nails clawing at bricks of self-imposed prisons, bloodied hands with flailing, failing bandages, pounding at locked wooden doors of the mind’s eye. ‘(struggling)’ presents discordant peals, and Lina’s off-kilter lamentful drones evocative, building a dark picture of a person trapped in a dilapidated house within their own mind, exploding at the three-minute mark into a jarring, churning, chug, and battery.
‘Endless Return To The Kingdom Of Sleep’ trades off big, hulking chugs with bursts of violence, before, finally, seventeen minutes into the album, the moment when the water of heaviness stops dripping on the cloth across our face… but the oppression isn’t really lifted, ‘Seeds of Frustration’, a track with a lyrical bent close to my heart, of reflection, of identifying flaws and frustrations, of finding ways to accept what can and can’t be changed is but a lull in the eye of the storm. A storm that picks up as ‘The Well Within’ howls into existence, pummelling deathly riffs.
From the ominous intent expressed from the very opening peals, the gloom of early Katatonia / Paradise Lost has swiftly washed away in a barrage of malevolent riffing, Lina ripping her throat, ex-Carnation drummer Vincent Verstrepen unleashing a cacophony of percussive chaos, via ‘Shedding Weathered Skin’ and it’s cavernous growls punctuating a pitch-black torment and brooding menace, to the mournful crawl building to a torrentous explosion of ‘Funerary Vision’, Predatory Void skilfully and abrasively tell a story of human fragility and imperfection to an ever-moving soundtrack that dynamically pushes, pulls, ebbs and flows.
Amenra? dISEMBOWELMENT? Converge? Isis? (Death Metal) Gojira? Crisis? Immolation? Swans? The music moves seamlessly and relentlessly, potentially recalling these icons and items, but maybe I’ve imposed those symbols and reference points myself to provide a map to follow the broken path laid out for my ears. Either way, Seven Keys To The Discomfort Of Being is not easy listening. It is a true “album”, where each song works best exactly where it is placed and unveiled as part of the dark journey, and it is all the better for it. And the newest member of the Church of Ra proves that their congregation continues to go from strength to strength.
Buy the album here:
https://predatoryvoid.lnk.to/SevenKeysToTheDiscomfortOfBeingID
8 / 10
STEVE TOVEY