The first track of the new Pyramid Mass EP exhumes you from a submerged tomb, new life breathed into your grey husk of a body. You don’t know how – you can barely form a coherent thought with your newly electrified brain. No telling how long you were gone or where you’re even at, but you’re feeling things you’ve never felt before in addition to a deeply rooted anxiety and the primal urge to run away – fast.
Welcome to Gargling Rot, a labyrinthine, brutalist structure teeming with the unknowable, stone walls flanking on all sides, foreboding lights flooding halls, a constant stench of death and painful silence stab at your core. For 17 minutes, it leaves you feeling hunted, like your life was returned to you against the natural order of things and now wrongs must be righted. Though moments of serenity and calm thoughtlessness exist, the violence of the greater moment envelopes you like no other.
It’s cerebral just as it is vaguely occult or eldritch, spacebound to alien worlds and yet always grounded in something representing reality. Your brain has minimal trouble making out its shapes and structures in general, but other forms cloud the corners and infect your senses with raw dread. Something arcane repulses you and yet your mind hungers to know. Pyramid Mass paint these scenes vividly with a diverse palette of black metal, death metal, and progressive ambient synth work, all coalescing to a horrifying, sharp point that lobotomizes you with each listen and makes you experience the cycle again.
Comparisons to last year’s Absolute Elsewhere by the great Blood Incantation will no doubt be plenty, but what’s different with Gargling Rot is the overall mood I’ve spent the last three paragraphs building up. Last year’s album of the year shoo-in felt exploratory and expansive, fun and trippy even; this EP feels constricting and purgative, a tentacled horror of undoing chasing you in your most vulnerable moment. Pyramid Mass really come off superbly vile here, not to mention more forward-thinking and smooth than their last LP, Monolith. The blackened tones – hell, even the more atmospheric ones – call to mind Thantifaxath more than anything else.
If there is a journey to be had here, it’s one through hell. What begins as a pensive and almost curious incident quickly plummets into abject horror by virtue of deft and sharp chaos management and mood control, emphasis on control. Any beauty to be gleaned from Gargling Rot is placebo, turned to ruin in a snap, but it’s just enough to lure you into a spell, lifting you above your prison only to drop you back in neck first to experience more terror until you turn feral or die. The final jarring minute of the EP seems to snuff out your life’s fire once again just as fast as it stoked it, leaving little interpretation outside of a harrowing, doomed end.
So, too, do Pyramid Mass come alive on Gargling Rot, even as they channel the blackest, darkest magic they can. The growth they exhibit is not unlike an invading sentient fungus or mold, animating nightmares and usurping life for its own selfish, base survival. It’s a supreme high for the band, an apex the likes of which should carry them to a lone gilded pedestal in metal’s underground. It’s as impressive as it is singularly apocalyptic, the complete physical and psychological ending of life in one of the most otherworldly, excellent ways.
Photo credit to Nick Crider
