Description
Originally released during the autumn of 2018, DYSYLUMN’s Occultation took this French duo to the precipice of the abyss – and they dove fully in. While the overt characteristics of French black metal – the robustness of the orthodox/religious school, the melancholy of its more lonerist school – are fully represented here, on Occultation did DYSYLUMN recast them in vivid new iterations.
Gutted bass throb, swirling ether of guitar, tortured throat that seamlessly blends into and out of both…there’s a certain sulfurous magick at work across this 51-minute album. One could easily qualify it as “hypnotic,” except DYSYLUMN’s overt physicality safely evades the usually defeatist tendencies of so much “depressive” black metal, instead poking and prodding and finally pushing the body and then mind with endlessly undulating waves and weaves of obsidian sound.
The sum effect is spellbinding, simply stunning the senses in a way few nowadays extreme metal records can – and doing it in an eerily tuneful manner, to boot.
Not for nothing have some called Occultation something of a modern classic: its breadth of vision is firmly rooted in black metal’s noblest traditions, but more so aims for the hinterlands of creativity and experience.
