I don’t use weighted blankets. I totally get their purpose and why people would find that sensation calming and peaceful, but they’re just not for me in concept. Instead, I like my music to weigh me down – mentally, physically, emotionally. I love doom, sludge, and post-metal for that especially, and y’all might know Switzerland’s Abraham fit into all of those buckets and more with a metamorphosed design that’s set them apart among the metal underground.
Last time we saw Abraham, they were reining in their expansive sound a bit – Débris de mondes perdus was a delight that wasn’t a ridiculous commitment of time and energy compared to Look, here comes the dark!. idsungwüssä is next, a name that, if you Google (or Bing) it, you’d wonder if it were a word the band made up as no official definition or translation seems to be easily searchable, it’s just about Abraham and their music – SEO is doing them well. In my likely ignorance, I find it to be enough of a fitting name, matching the more unknowable and esoteric structures the band flits between, and yet you can muster up a pronunciation in your head to give it life, at least if you’re into Romanized Western languages.
Anyway, idsungwüssä is the end of a trilogy of albums focused on the heavy, dilapidating, complete evisceration of a world, or maybe even worlds. Abraham are experts in tone and exacting on a mood, and one as dark as this requires some nuance to stand above the rest. It’s easy to play fast and tune your shit as low as it can go, yell on a mic, and have it called apocalyptic – I’ve certainly done it before – but it’s another to channel what we believe to be a representation of a great end and distill it into music.
I think Abraham do that well. There’s swirls of melody in the songs on idsungwüssä, but a lot of it is atmospheric and weighted in rhythm and repetition. “I Am the Vessel and the Vessel Is Me” capitalizes on both by having an off-putting melody throughout, but the drums are constantly shifting and palpitating like an irregular heartbeat under stress. Then you have songs like “A Discomposite Shell” and “Suurwäut” (especially its midsection) which are more visceral and upfront with their undoing – more action, more chaos, more.
This forms the ebb and flow by which Abraham unravel their world and ours, something built up over almost three hours of music before idsungwüssä was even released. This shift between maybe and definitely in terms of when destruction is actively happening is uncomfortable. Each new song is a different test of anxiety and fear, forcing you to ask yourself ‘is there where it happens?’ or not. Hell, what ‘it’ even is is open to interpretation. I don’t see anyone interpreting this dreary malaise as something positive like creation or growth, but maybe that’s just me. Each song is uniquely anguished and sundering a different aspect of life until it’s a pit of black, telegraphed years ago by Look, here comes the dark!. The most inviting section of this album is probably the lovely, progressive synth lead in the intro of “En Tüüfus Tümpu” and even that manages to feel alien and uncanny.
As idsungwüssä goes on, it wears on you. It may be a bit long, but it’s never hard to listen to or unfulfilling, it just demands something different from you that other bands don’t. There’s hints and teases of this in other Abraham music of course, the band have stayed pretty sonically consistent over the last decade, but this album feels like the heralding of a new age, probably because it thematically ends the current one. Ends are almost always hard, teeming with sadness and the collapse of what we held close to us, sometimes that means examining ourselves and what we put out into the world. Coming to terms with it is arduous and crippling, something I think Abraham capture so well here. When idsungwüssä closes with “Home”, you feel like you’re at anything but, all comfort and peace dissolved and in its place a crater you do not fit in. The instrumentation, while still varied and captivating, is more destitute and vacant until the end which is a crescendo of mass proportions that leaves everything hollowed from the pounding and tearing. Deep inside, you know that everything was always leading to this moment. Now what?
