Outer Gods– Light Dims Eternal (Domestic Genocide Records)
Among the most immediately noticeable facets of Outer Gods' first full-length (released after a quick succession of demos that've appeared over the past year or so) is that many of the features that render it inviting are also the ones that make it seem the most off-putting. Though the Atlanta duo manages to combine elements of harsh post-industrial drone with placid ambience and aesthetic flourishes borrowed from black metal's stranger extremes in a seamless fashion, they're not the first to dabble in this sort of gentle/abrasive dualism. But unlike many of the metal bands that got weird or the experimental musicians who came to realize their aesthetic affinities with heavy music, Outer Gods trade in both harshness and accesibility, to an extent that the two narrowly avoid working at cross purposes with each other.
On one hand are the dark extremes. Pieces (“songs” seems like the wrong word) like “Blessed Be The Host Of Sorrow” feature an almost Sunn O))-like guitar dirge underpinning what sounds like the vocalist's attempt to out-dissonance the layers of fractured electronics enshrouding the organic instrumentation, before giving way to a more subdued coda that's no less unsettling for its volume drop. Similarly, the minimal percussive clangor and sustained high-pitched drones of “From Behind The Walls, She Heard A Voice Like An Angel” are almost monomaniacal in their insistent repetition, each marching insistently into a bleak morass of unsettling sound.
But on the other hand, moments of subtle beauty manifest themselves, shining through the more corrosive textural elements in a manner that transcends simply adding a contrasting element or two. “Due Sabbati” is probably the most readily apparent instance of this, with woozy guitars propping up layers of shimmering keyboard that gradually become louder and harsher until they become torrents of sound that cannot subsume the more melodic elements no matter how many layers of glitchy distortion are piled on top. Similarly, while opener “Future Decay” relies on some of the minimal percussion and harsh black metal-style vocals present elsewhere on the album, the guitar elements that hold it all together swell and recede like some twisted attempt to evoke Mogwai or Mono's more ethereal moments.
But while the dissonance/consonance duality is on full display here, one hopes that neither extreme alienates any listener more interested in either its counterbalancing opposite. Given the bleakness of the band's visual aesthetic and their aesthetic affiliations with metal, most people approaching Light Dims Eternal are likely to be doing so expecting little more than harshness – something the band certainly delivers, though not without nuance and variation. Others, seeing the band tagged as ambient or experimental – certainly not entirely inaccurate descriptors – could be put off by the shrieking vocals and dirgey guitars. But while Outer Gods are hardly the first to metallize their ambience or prettify their noise, they construct an atmosphere out of these seemingly disparate halves more cohesively than most, leaving an unsettling body of work that refuses to ally itself with any easily preconceived aesthetic extreme.