Lotus Thief - "The Book of the Dead" (Song Premiere)

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San Francisco’s Lotus Thief’s music joins two sometimes opposing genres: post-rock and black metal. Premiering exclusively below, the album’s first track “The Book Of The Dead” rocks (in space) just as it raises invisible oranges. It’s about flow: not immediate switches, but gradients in and out of both styles.

If you’re familiar with Botanist, self-described “green metal,” then you’re tangentially familiar with Lotus Thief’s self-described “text metal” (more below). Drummer Otrebor and composer Bezaelith’s musical philosophy remains the same in both groups, to add lightness and ‘Mother Earth’ aesthetics to black metal. To wit, blastbeats emerge from dust left behind by clean-sung melodies. Consolation is offered during softer moments; ascendancy when the dawn breaks.

<-Andrew Rothmund

As for the whole “text metal” thing, yes, All Lotus Thief songs are about books. Very, very old ones. It’s not a new thing in metal – Nile have covered the same Book of the Dead many times – but Bezaelith’s commitment to the theme is unprecedented. Here’s here context for this particular song:

“The Book of the Dead is a beautiful text of its time, a sort of instruction manual for the afterlife compiled over about a thousand years and often inscribed on sarcophagi or tomb walls, hence the title “coffin spells”. The texts span everything from funerary instructions to spells that reunite one with relatives or familiarize one with gods. What drew us to the text was the alien beauty of the text itself as well as the big picture. Here was a belief system predating the western world with its own sense of judgment of human psyche, its own order of the universe with roles of deities, and its own grip of the power of a single human mind even after the body is shed.

There is a feeling of finality, limitation, and yet a vast strange order of rules to the text, as if the reader were stepping into a highly established social order just beyond the veil of death. For us, the song needed to be as vast and colorful as possible to approach the text, jumping from wild passages of harsh vocals to building solos, to calm ideological eyes of the storm from one moment to the next.”

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Gramarye releases on September 16 via Prophecy Productions.

Lotus Theif are about to embark on a brief East Coast tour with the mgihty A Sound of Thunder. Here’s the itinerary.

September 16 White Hall, MD Camp Hidden Valley (* As part of Shadow Woods Metal Fest w/ Mantar, Tombs, etc.)
September 17 Brooklyn, NY Gold Sounds
September 18 Clifton, NJ Dingbatz
September 19 Philadelphia, PA Kung Fu Necktie

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