The lunatics have taken over the asylum... and the recording studio. To say that OvO's sixth album is ‘out there’ doesn't begin to even hint at the crazed racket that is 'Cor Cordium'. Sludge guitars, pulverising percussion and gnarled vocals that veer between chthonic growls and high-pitched, twisted, manic gargles are central characteristics, but the scope of 'Cor Cordium' extends far beyond the parameters of any standard metal blueprint. In fact, it goes beyond the realms of ordinary music.
The first couple of tracks hit like a sledgehammer, only heavier, a messed-up barrage of overloading guitar noise, doomy and distorted, and drums like explosions. Feeling like I’ve been bludgeoned with a length of scaffolding, I need time to reflect.
That time arrives right on cue. 'Marie' begins with a sing-song melody, almost child-like in sound, although there's a sinister undercurrent, like children's singing in horror films is always disturbing and a sign of some kind of madness and terror afoot. Sure enough, it comes in the form of a deluge of earth-shuddering guitars as the vocals twist and tear off into incomprehensible mania. It's enough to send a shiver down the spine strong enough to dislocate the pelvis.
There's some respite from the heavy guitars during 'Penumbra Y Caos', but its creeping fear chords and nightmare-replicating incidentals are hardly soothing, and eventually a heavy drone guitar breaks through in a rumbling avalanche, before the doom-laden 'Orcus' tears from the speakers, Stefania Pedretti's strangled howls of anguish pitted against cranium-crushing guitars.
The album's centrepiece, 'Smelling Death Around' is an exercise in epic strangeness. At first quiet and semi-ambient, Pedretti's vocals a bizarre quavering, bleating falsetto, it's only a matter of time - five minutes in, in fact, roughly halfway through this monstrous beast of a track - before the bowel-shaking bass crawls onto the desolate scene. It's not only the smell of death, but the sound of death. Music really doesn't come any darker than this.
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There are hyped-up bleeps and squiggles and pitch-shifted vocals bounding around atop the subsonic bass on the supermanic 'La Bestia'. If Picasso's 'Guernica' or Hieronymus Bosch's nightmare images were to have a soundtrack, this should be it. 'The Owls Are Not What They Look Like' falls somewhere between early Earth and Throbbing Gristle at their ugliest and most confrontational, an eight minute journey through darkest hell. Synth drones, solar winds and low, heavy grind fills the air, occasionally cut through with strange extraneous interventions and tribal drumming.
By the time the immeasurably heavy and brutal stop/start slab of sonic violence that is 'In Ogni Caso Nessun Rimorso' shudders to a halt, there is nothing but devastation. A remarkable album in every way, 'Cor Cordium' is not for those of a nervous disposition. It's one of the heaviest, most intense albums I've ever heard - and heavy and intense is my thing. Crazy, brilliant and awesome.
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