On its second album, the Portland quartet conjures a sense of ambient horror with shapeshifting, high-velocity death metal.
Horizons aren’t what they used to be. Now that we’re surrounded at all times by horror—political, biological, climatological—the idea of something awful lurking in the distance, threatening to put an end to life as we know it, is frankly a little banal. When creeping death becomes everyday reality, it can feel like just another distraction. On Deconsecrate, the second album from Portland death-metal quartet Ænigmatum, that ambient horror slowly begins to take over, clouding the band’s joyful mutations as they careen along the borders of black, death, speed, tech, melodic—basically any high-velocity form of metal.
The gyroscope keeping this wildly spinning machine together is bassist Brian Rush, whose fretless runs fill these songs with a melodic light that, when coupled with hyper-melodic tom fills from drummer Pierce Williams, decants what would otherwise be very claustrophobic music, making it feel spacious and hungry with possibility. His contributions are key to the album’s constant shapeshifting, signaling changes in texture and rhythm that the rest of the band gamely follows.
“Forged in Bedlam” opens the album in a slushy hail of guitars, but within 30 seconds, the bass has re-routed the band into a subdued thunderstorm. With a roar from vocalist and guitarist Kelly McLaughlin, the group heads back into the fray with a relentless grindcore beat, only to be seduced once again as the bass snakes and curves its way around the mix. A similar dynamic plays out in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” whose harsh noise intro is filleted by a groove onto which the rest of the band grafts themselves, with Rush’s bass line forming the spine of the re-skinned song. Like Death’s Steve Di Giorgio or Damon Good of Ænigmatum’s 20 Buck Spin labelmates VoidCeremony, Rush’s bass lines work like blushes of pink that underlight a Renaissance cloud, their virtuosity and articulation complementing the music with strange, heartfelt melancholy.
Guitarists McLaughlin and Eli Lundgren frequently stick together, twinning their leads and riffing in tandem. They occasionally break apart for dramatic effect, as in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” where they stagger their riffs alongside Rush’s bass in a way that makes them feel like a phalanx armed and ready for the approach. The duo flash coppery sheets of noise across “Disenthralled,” transitioning into a trad-metal duel and raking the song into a peg-legged rhythm pattern that passes through multiple forms. Like a jazz combo holding the one across the changes, they manage to imply the groove even once they’ve stopped playing it. Their constant fluidity turns the album’s thousand little crags into one long, humming vibration, the sound of a truck’s tires speeding over a gravel road.
As Deconsecrate plays out, Ænigmatum introduce subtle changes in the frequency, and the gloom eventually catches up with them. The back half of the album still rages, but the guitars occasionally slow to a prolonged burn. Even when they sprint, it feels like a requiem played at warp speed, and the thrashing and moaning that come off as swashbuckling in the first half of the record begin to feel like a form of pleading. Like the disgraced monarch in Jean-Paul Laurens’ painting The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, they are still in power, but they are stripped of their spirit. It’s a portrait of triumph in reverse.
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