...SIŁA I PIĘKNO MUZYKI TKWIĄ W JEJ RÓŻNORODNOŚCI...


..::OPIS::..

'Jeśli długo patrzysz w otchłań, otchłań również patrzy w ciebie'

Nietzsche


Wiecie co jest chujowe? Że przez ten śmieszny „blackest” metalowy Xicifruk słysząc obecnie nazwę Qrixkuor mam cały czas skojarzenie, które podświadomie stara się obrzydzić mi muzykę Brytyjczyków. Ale taki chuj, nie dam się!

No, chwilę kazali czekać na następcę „Poison Palinopsia”. Cztery lata – niby dużo, ale jakoś minęło, szczególnie że po drodze jeszcze ukazała się EPka „Zoetrope”. Ale w końcu jest nowy krążek – „The Womb of the World”. I jak jest? No kurwa, jest trochę inaczej. A nawet nie trochę. I nie bez kozery wspomniałem tutaj o „Zoetrope”, bowiem to na niej Qrixkuor wprowadziło orkiestracje do swojej muzyki. Czy jak to tam zwał. Natomiast na drugiej płycie odpowiadający za całość Steve jeszcze bardziej je rozbuchał, nasycając ten mroczny death metal niemal do granicy wytrzymałości. Serio – odnoszę wrażenie, że „The Womb of the World” jest jakąś mroczną odpowiedzią na death/black metalową symfonię zniszczenia – przy użyciu instrumentów dętych, smyczkowych, szarpanych… Dzieje się tutaj wiele. Muzyka Qrixkuor już wcześniej była chaotyczna, pełna zmian tempa, ciężaru – teraz gdy dochodzą te wszystkie orkiestracyjne elementy mamy wrażenie, że całość zaraz eksploduje od ilości dźwięków. Również w kwestii wokali mamy nieco zmian – poza grobowymi growlami i pomrukiwaniami, dostajemy jeszcze (co prawda gościnnie) damskie, opętane partie w „And You Shall Know Perdition As Your Shrine…” – autorstwa Jaded Lung z Adorior. Ja Wam się przyznam, że w notce promo szukałem wspominki o Hekte Zaren, bo stopień obłąkania w tych aranżacjach jest niemożliwy. Zestawiając to z chorymi smyczkami, uderzeniami dzwonu i ponurymi, potężnymi gitarami dostajemy istne, muzyczne pandemonium. Teraz musimy zadać sobie jednak najważniejsze pytanie: czy to co słyszymy jest dobre?

Moim zdaniem tak, choć równocześnie mam wrażenie, że granica między nazwijmy to artyzmem a kiczem jest dość cienka. Nie mówiąc już o tym, że z uwagi na te zmiany, wielu słuchaczy którzy uważali „Poison Palinopsia” za album bardzo dobry lub wręcz doskonały (jak ja) mogą po prostu odbić się od „The Womb of the World” z uwagi na mnogość wtrętów… Co ja mówię – to już nie są wtręty, to jest pełnoprawna część płyty. I to właśnie paradoksalnie może być problem. Dla mnie nie – mamy do czynienia z muzycznym obrazem Sodomy i Gomory, a najwyraźniej znajdujące się w tych miastach orkiestry postanowiły zostać i grać do samego końca. Stąd wzięło się właśnie „The Womb of the World”.

Czy to album lepszy od „Poison Palinopsia”? Subiektywnie powiem – chyba nie. Jak widać, ja też muszę wyjść ze strefy komfortu względem tego zespołu i przełamać się w zupełności, co nie zawsze się udaje. Czy będzie to płyta dyskutowana? Nie wiem – Qrixkuor nie jest chyba aż tak popularny, by masowo dyskutowano o jego muzyce i rozkładano ją na czynniki pierwsze. A trochę szkoda, bo na to w pełni zasługuje. Wciąż to bardzo dobra pozycja, choć bardzo złożona i trudna. Na pewno zasługuje na wiele przesłuchań, zanim wydacie swoją opinię.

Oracle


Well, are they? Were they ever really playing it or were we just calling everything with a lot of tremolo patterns and reverb caverncore?

Cruciamentum and Dead Congregation had only tangential links to it and were increasingly defined by their love of Morbid Angel rather than Incantation. Vacivus dropped it entirely for Temple of the Abyss. Ignivomous did the same for their sophomore, then moved away even further for the third album. Grave Miasma went from a flagship of the style to a neighbor of it by the time of Abyss of Wrathful Deities.

It's probably not a great sign for a style if its founders rapidly begin leaving it behind or it turns out that they didn't really count as participants in the first place. It's not going extinct by any means with bands like Encoffination, Grave Upheaval, and Antediluvian still being active. Yet the third band gains more attention than the former in my experience and it's not hard to hear why.

This style, born primarily out of a mixture of bands like Blasphemy, Incantation, 90's Imprecation, and especially Demoncy's Joined in Darkness, fused the murk of the forms of primitive first wave black metal and death metal closest to one another, foregoing the faster, frozen Nordic melodies and relentless riffage of the death metal of the late 90's and early 2000's for something slower, implicit rather than explicit, and very, very murky.

It was refreshing for its time but rapidly demonstrated itself as even narrower than the OSDM and dissodeath it formed a sort of united front with against the brutal-technical-hyperblasting paradigm of that era. Increasingly cryptic, or if you're an A24 filmbro, "elevated" takes on it have begin to sprout up simply because in a style so reductive, any bit of creativity starts massively changing the norm. Antedluvian are one of the longstanding practitoners of caverncore as a whole but have also always been one of the stranger, noisier ones. Recently they have been joined by Epitaphe, last album Prometheus (Greece), Defacement, possibly Khthoniik Cerviiks, Vile Ritual, Hadit, and of course, Qrixkuor in opening up a vast front for this overpopulated style.

A part of the burgeoning death metal revival in the UK, Qrixkuor admittedly weren't anything to write home about when they got their start in 2014, simply one amongst many cavern-dwellers in a rapidly crowded style. 2017 would see them make a few changes to their sound that would begin a cascade of musical mutations. Their sound got somewhat more conventionally riffy but also began to let a bit of Immolation creep in as well as working in simple but spacious harmonies communicating an increasingly surreal, warped atmosphere. What Three Devils Dance hinted at, Poison Palinopsia would fully indulge in becoming an outright psychedelic, swirling morass of Nightbringer and Bestia Arcana esque shimmering harmonies emerging out of the choking fog of a cavernous baseline. The next escalation came in the form of 2022's Zoetrope EP which saw the band veering into the territory of-

Symphonic metal?

Close enough, welcome back Amnesia.

(Listen to Land of No Return.)

Okay, they didn't turn into Nightwish or Fleshlight Aslopalypse but it's definitely not a Nuclear Blast band from the 2000's either. I've seen a comparison to Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk and to their credit, they're still primarily a riffs-first band. The fancy strings and creepy choirs are simply an excellent set of appetizers, sauce, and seasoning that plays off of it but they've become a far more dynamic band as a whole, something this orchestral onslaught is assisted by rather than vice versa. They're juggling a lot now but the cavernous tendency towards abstraction ends up creating a space where much of what might come off as superfluous excess finds a space to create a variety of unsettling harmonies and sinister melodies. It's an unexpectedly intuitive fit.

Three years have passed and with the assistance of "The Orchestra of the Silent Stars", The Womb of the World has arrived and once again, transformed the promise of an EP into a full length. It's not just an orchestra that has changed; Qrixkuor's riffing is at its most active and dynamic yet even within the boundaries of this style. Psychotic, alien leads wail out from behind the haze of the booming, sonorous symphonics and reverberating riffing buttresses the shrill cries of a massive string section, ghostlike and towering in its supernatural majesty. Qrixkuor's sound had been leaning towards becoming busier and busier, positively becoming an entire metropolis' worth of activity.

Purely in terms of presentation, Qrixkuor simply have an incredible grasp of satisfyingly visceral black-death. It can definitely get lost under the increasingly surreal, sometimes vaguely "horror movie film score from the pain dimension featuring Penderecki from the War Crime Orchestra Series" lunacy unfolding. They aren't exactly big on lame turboposer bullshit like "hooks" and "easily discerned song structure" either. Still, the shock and awe effect here works amazingly well, building on the raw impact and immediacy of their increasingly aggressive, demanding sound.

You can make a pretty good argument for Qrixkuor as being symphonic death/black metal now but they're rather select in the usage of the subgenre prefix. The main weapon in the arsenal is still Steve's ever-twisting riffs and at times wildly unhinged lead playing, setting up ambience and intensity as the actual symphonies loom and lurk in the spaces created by the reverberating attack. At times they'll flesh out the colour and tonality of a segment, holding back and lurking in the background, but The Womb of the World allows for more than a few moments where the riffs dial back a little and the strings begin to work their warped magic.

Not "cut out for a clean break" (sorry, no Opeth interludes here!), Steve is still riffing away. These relatively less busybodied portions allow for relatively lower-key but no less insidious technique to play into surrealistic qualities of the orchestration. It can border on overwhelmingly maddening when both are going at it near to actually full-throttle but the band know when to save up for those moments, keeping their cards close to their chest and not afraid to rely on pure metallic craftsmanship. Like the best of oddball experimental metal, whether it's recent Orgone, !T.O.O.H.!, or Fleshvessel, Qrixkuor's metal parts are fused tightly into their not-so-metal ones, enough that they often come off as extensions of one another. They are a more adventurous band than they were a little over a decade ago, but the core ideas they began with have evolved to accomodate growing ambitions.

Does Qrixkuor still count as a caverncore band now or have they "decavernized"? There's a solid argument for either perspective - there's more actual riffing going on and even at its weirdest, everything is more concrete rather than esoteric as a whole. The dynamism of death metal plays a larger role as well; even the orchestra reflects this in how it always as a response to Steve at just the right moments. I would still leant owards being I suppose "progressive caverncore"; they're still less about jagged death metal intensity and a lot of it intentionally blurs into these giant, textured tidal waves sonorous and seemingly endless in nature. As such, its black metal aspect isn't exactly pushed into a supporting role either and if anything, this makes a case for the possiblities still present in this style (and for a bit of needlessly arrogant and smug genre chauvinism, the acknolwedgement of how much the black metal aesthetics require a heavy dose of death metal architecture to get their full mileage).

Even if you don't like caverncore (entirely justified, Sturgeon's Rule hit this style almost as mercilessly bad as war metal), Qrixkuor are best understood on their own terms. For years, people thought that evil, atmospheric, morbid death metal bands experimenting with film-score esque bombast and string sections were something that would be relegated to one off oddities from the 90's until the 2000's made us regret us wishing for that. Over 30 years into the genre's history and bands are finally making a distant pipe dream into a well realized artistic effort.

They aren't going to be alone this year. Lychgate's Precipice, featuring Greg Chandler who produced The Womb of the World, seems to be headed for a similar level of lunacy that also shifts towards death metal influence in a way older works iddn't. Fleshvessel's Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded also taking their sound in a much faster, more explosive direction combined with zany chamber music outbursts, something they already had a good deal of experience with albeit with doomier death metal and far less black metal in the mix. While only Qrixkuor would count as caverncore among them, they all seem to suggest a potential new frontier forming at death metal's fringes without any strict allegiances to style or subgenre.

I would be hesitant to say that caverncore is in an entirely better state than previously. Straight from the start it already had the most overt shorcomings of all the major latter day pure death metal movements but perhaps this wasn't really as much of an issue as once thought. Historically, limitations have always been one of metal's best allies. Colombian ultra metal, Brazilian bestialfagoccultism, and even the second wave of black metal were typically defined by a far lower level of technicality and restrictive genre boundaries, yet they laid the foundations for some of the most explosive genre growth that much extreme metal still rests upon to this day. Caverncore is unlikely to have the same far-ranging effects like every other form of metal this far into its history, but the same things that limit it have also been morphed and exploited to unlock the potential that once could only be hintd at and theorized. As it turns out, change is often the only constant; it's just a matter of time as to when it begins notably materializing.

Stillborn Machine



..::TRACK-LIST::..

1. So Spoke the Silent Stars 12:02
2. Slithering Serendipity 12:51
3. And You Shall Know Perdition As Your Shrine... 08:30
4. The Womb of the World 16:53



..::OBSADA::..

S - Guitars, bass and vocals
D - Drums



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uw6mYjFS4M


SEED 15:00-22:00.
POLECAM!!!