Italian doom-tinged post-metal tautologists Deadly Carnage have come a long way from their black metal origins to deliver their fourth full-length album, and it’s not short on ambition. ‘Through the Void, Above the Suns’ is pitched as ‘a phenomenal journey, an unmatched vision of the Cosmos with all its tangible and intangible components: stars, dark matter, black holes’.
The thematically-linked song titles convey the conceptual nature of the album more than the music itself, and the lyrics are largely indecipherable. Not that any of it matters: does anyone really listen to an album like this first and foremost to sing along? ‘Through the Void’ is very much an album geared toward total immersion. Sonically, and compositionally, ‘Through the Void’ is an expansive work. There are lengthy instrumental passages, and they’re all about the riffs.
It begins with monastic voices echoing amidst a swirling, spacey drone: ‘Quantum’ sets the atmosphere before the heavy throb of thick, sludgy guitars power in on ‘Matter’. With such crushing weight and intense darkness, it’s more like the sonic replication of dark matter, and it possesses more than enough density to have gravitational force.
‘Lumis’ thunders and burns, but hardly glows with the life-giving light of our sun as we experience it: the song more closely conveys the incendiary heat of a ball of fire generating 15 million degrees Celsius.
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Of the album’s last four tracks, three stretch past the seven-minute mark toward the event horizon. Rolling pianos and oceanic chiming drifts are atomised beneath the surge, interrupted only by the brief, Oceansize-like proggy, post-rock flickerings of ‘Fractals’. Critical mass attained, but without any sacrifice of melody, the guitars fire full throttle and soar before disappearing into the infinite void.
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