Scads of artists have set out to capture the scope of the last two years’ global despair on tape. It’s a heavy task, and few are as fitting to take it on as members of Amenra, Sepultra, and Neurosis, united here in the supergroup. Each member’s resumé is filled with almost oppressively dark music that is as heavy musically as emotionally. I’m thinking specifically of Amenra’s De Doorn, which was birthed as a public works project to mourn the lives lost from their village in World War I a century before.
Plague God delivers exactly what you’d expect from the aim of its project and its players. The band describes its goal to “seek out what’s truly human” in “an era overrun by information, misinformation, unseen algorithms, and viral contagion,” and they get as close to that goal as cathartic screams, distorted guitars, dark electronic bursts, and bone-rattling drums can. The album feels as radical as it does reverent, its cacophony of sonic anarchy serving as a canvas for mourning and celebration, grief and hope, devoutness and doubt.
The lyrics swing between extremes of light and dark, feeling the full measure of them. Their mortality is at the forefront, death as present to them now as decades from now. On the opening track, he screams, “for what it’s worth, dying from birth, what is my worth? My time here on earth?” In “The Acres/The Ache,” Colin H. van Eeckhout wrestles with the isolation of pandemic: “I long and belong and I miss being missed. How your absence filled the world.” In Spirit of Spite,” he delivers a spoken-word missive in a moment of rare quietness, saying “we all carry inside us the seeds of our own death. We will not give in to threat. You conquered like cancer.”
Escapism certainly has its merit. Throughout the global pandemic and social upheaval of the last two years, its proven its worth as a survival method. But Plague God shows that there is something healing about staring unflinchingly into the eyes of calamity. It is cathartic in the rawest sense of the word. And with as much turmoil as we’ve all faced recently, there’s something healing about screaming into the void in defiance—or at least blasting a record that does just that.
Plague God is out March 25 on Relapse Records.
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