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Robert

Embrace of Thorns Embrace Destruction On "Mutter Aller Leiden"

Robert
Robert

The horrific, piercing violin sounds which open Krzyzstof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima are as ubiquitous as the overall piece itself. Ever one to understate, Penderecki once said, “I was struck by the emotional charge of the work[…],” which only partially addresses the clattering horror of this cataclysmic sonoristic setting of the Hiroshima bombing. It embodies the cloud of nuclear death which sprinted across the city’s expanse, the music a miasma of impenetrability all the same.

To hear this siren sound herald a new work by Greece’s Embrace of Thorns is unexpected, and yet Scorn Aesthetics also shares the same spirit of Penderecki’s most infamous work. It reeks of war, death, and despair. Though Embrace of Thorns and Penderecki may not sound alike — a metal band and modern classical music piece couldn’t be more dissimilar in most cases — the mournful and catastrophic sounds communicated through this band’s crushing blackened death metal finds the two occupying a spiritual center.

“[T]his album is permeated by feelings of liberating hopelessness,” says vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Archfiend DevilPig. “The end of all things that poison and infiltrate us during our lifecycle.” Though the negativity which paints the majority of the war-centric end of extreme metal generally speaks to the glorification of violence and wanton destruction, the communicated bleakness of Embrace of Thorns’s art occupies a completely different headspace. There is a despondency and downtrodden resignation hidden within Scorn Aesthetics‘s depictions of destruction, something felt by those experiencing it. Feel the sorrow and the fear of the destroyed.

Scorn Aesthetics will be released June 22nd on Iron Bonehead Productions. Listen to “Mutter Aller Leiden,” the mother of all throes, below.

From the artist:

“Mutter aller Leiden,” roughly translated as mother of all throes, was one of the first tracks composed for the Scorn Aesthetics album and it epitomizes the realization of the end of hope giving its place to the birth of strife and consciousness. In general, this album is permeated by feelings of liberating hopelessness. The music is charged and characterized by various peaks and bottoms and emphasis is put on the much desired end. The end of all things that poison and infiltrate us during our lifecycle.

It is a requiem for the grand illusion and as such Scorn Aesthetics is an album possessed by a sense of ultimacy and absolution.

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