amiensus abreaction

Amiensus's Restorative Black Metal Breathes While "Drowned"

amiensus abreaction

Black metal often rips but seldom weaves. Destruction (as the antithesis to construction) accounts for a large swath of symbolism and themeology in all of metal, not to mention within black metal’s especially vivid nocturne. Clearly, any kind of metal can be about death, demise, and decay while sounding uplifting or triumphant, but even that path has been paved smooth by thousands of treading (and sometimes dragging) feet. The question is whether you want to turn art into rubble, or rubble into art, and that is precisely where black metal quintet Amiensus come into focus. Their brand of onslaught carries in its wind a dualism: nature’s power to create and destroy. Or, in other words, music’s power to tear down and rebuild.

Neither overly uplifting nor completely draining, Amiensus‘s latest foray into their blossoming but somber sound comes as this new music video for “Drowned,” a song that will appear on an upcoming full-length Abreaction later this year to follow 2015’s Ascension. Watch below.

The mood on “Drowned” is that of awe and subservience to forces greater than any one person can restrain — the song relishes in its own gradual build as well as the smooth delivery of clean vocals to counterpoint the harsh ones. Amiensus teeters carefully on the balances created by such contrasts, as they always have, but now see increased cohesion and more delicate songwriting (perhaps the benefits of being in the game for a decade, but also because the band simply whips, full stop).

Even the video itself, and the song’s production, exudes the qualities that made the band’s 2013 debut Restoration so mighty — these things don’t come from a polished place, but Amiensus powerhouses them into a beautiful synchrony with delicate yet brutal force. It’s nothing other than black metal but diverges from so much of the subgenre’s trappings that, well, it makes you question for a second. Am I listening to death, or life, or both?

Could they be the same thing?

These questions (and many more) abound themselves when Amiensus is playing, and that’s what sets the band apart from many other in this ilk. Black metal can suffer from “one note syndrome” quite often, but that issue has never arisen with this group. But as varied and glistening as “Drowned” is, there’s a driving punch hiding between the seams that, still, knocks you back in your seat a bit. Consider me, for one, completely sold.

Abreaction releases later this year via Transcending Records.

amiensus band

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