Unearthly Trance - V
Music hardly scares me now. After a zillion albums of “scary” noises from natural and artificial instruments, I’ve heard the tricks of Western “extreme” music. Knowledge removes fear. The average metal album with goats and pentagrams? In 1989, that might have been scary. Now it’s bait for a target demographic.
But V (Relapse, 2010) is different. Yes, it has goats and pentagrams. Yes, it’s nominally familiar. It’s unmistakably an Unearthly Trance record. Ryan Lipynsky’s voice, his riffs, the feel of his band – with Unearthly Trance records, you need not ask, “Who is this?” But on V, you now must ask, Sabbath-like, “What is this, that stands before me?”
Much heavy music is art of catharsis. People build up negative energy, and they release it through music. There’s nothing wrong with that. Entire subgenres form around “Arrrrrrgh!” But usually that’s all there is – expulsion of energy. Few bands have the power to accrete, not dissipate. Khanate, Tom G. Warrior’s last two records, Brutal Truth live – they expel not just energy, but a presence.
I work out in my room, and it gets hot. If I go to the bathroom and come back, my expended energy, trapped within those walls, is still palpable. It’s feverish, oppressive, maybe toxic. This record is as if I found that my energy had collected into a being, looking back at me.
. . .
What does this beast look like? Well, it’s bigger than me. And it probably has features of me. That’s what fear is – a projection of some aspect of oneself. (Maybe that’s why, aside from low creativity or budget, movie monsters and aliens are often anthropomorphic.) Other than that, I can’t really tell. It’s more of a presence than a vision.
But I do know that this beast is kicking my ass. It’s around me. It’s very real. So many metal albums now have the requisite ambient intro (in hell, all bands will listen to their ambient intros for eternity), then go into their version of banging pots and pans. It’s so constructed and predictable. One can just hit stop and get on with the real world. But V feels real. It’s like a nightmare from which one can’t awake. At first, it may not even feel like a nightmare.
By today’s standards, it’s not overtly aggressive. Many records are louder, faster, more downtuned, more “more”. But this one pulls you in. It works slowly. The riffs contract and expand. The melodies make sense. (“Solar Eye” is really just a heavy blues.) And Ryan Lipynsky isn’t yelling at you. Maybe he’s muttering or howling at something in the distance, but he’s no boogeyman with a mic.
Then, before you know it, you’re halfway into this horror of an hour, and you realize that all that contraction and expansion was really breathing. It’s all around you. You’re in the belly of the beast. It’s grinding you up, slowly. Sometimes teeth and acid speed things up. Otherwise you’re in pitch black darkness, turning into pulp.
. . .
. . .
The record itself describes a similar situation. It’s drenched in occultic imagery – goats, pentagrams, hexagrams, the sun, the moon, numbers. Glyn Smyth’s artwork and Lipynsky’s lyrics offer clues about this sigil soup. A recurring motif is the solar eye in the pyramid. The booklet features what looks like a perversion of the Great Seal of the United States – an eagle with a body like an infinity symbol atop a winged lion’s head, clutching a snake and a trident. Arrows bristle from around it, and two groups of five stars hover nearby. The pyramid/solar eye and the Great Seal of the United States are symbols on the US one dollar bill, with Masonic associations.
Lipynsky’s lyrics also have a political tinge. They recall Neuroses’ with their elemental references – fire, ice, sun, electricity. But certain lines reveal a head not in the clouds, but concerned with the terrestrial: “So few control so many”; “There are kings who will drink your last drop of blood / And there are slaves that pathetically worship fools”; “Souls devoured by the oligarchs”. Perhaps Lipynsky is referring to what some call “The New World Order”. (However, he seems to subvert the traditional notion of the solar eye as a mechanism of Masonic surveillance by recasting it as the individual eye of knowledge, the means of self-defense through vigilance.)
I’m not sure; I’m not well-versed in the occult, and much if not most of these references escape me. But I bet Lipynsky’s talking about end times, and I bet he thinks they won’t be pretty. He, his bandmates, and Smyth have conjured up an amazing audiovisual representation of this. I may not understand it all, but it feels menacing and very real. Music has hardly scared me like this.
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HEAR V
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“The Horsemen Arrive in the Night”
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“Current”
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SEE V
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BUY V
Amazon (MP3)
Amazon (CD)
Amazon (LP)
The End (CD, 2LP)
Relapse (CD, 2LP, shirt)
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