“From top floor luxury to the rotten underground.“
The modern foundations for extremely obfuscative, dissonant, heavy music were laid very deliberately in the 90s (with acts like Mike Patton‘s Mr Bungle and Fantômas, or John Zorn‘s Naked City). Today, dissonance remains a rising theme. Within black metal, home studio projects like Serpent Column, or long-time scene champions like Krallice and Liturgy emphasize the genre’s potential for all consuming aggression. Current death metal has bands run wild with dissonance, like Artificial Brain and Cathexis, and of course the gestalt Gorguts are occasionally active. Even The Mars Volta are back. Imperial Triumphant are here to declare this decade as the “Discordant Twenties” with the surgically chaotic Spirit of Ecstasy.
Imperial Triumphant are a New York three-piece, set apart from the rest of the extreme metal scene in two ways. First, every aspect of their sound is challenging and abrasive – be it their song structures; harsh vocals; densely dissonant and intricate guitarwork; or their chaotic embellishing textures. Second, their visual style and lyrical themes directly invoke the art deco opulence of their home city. These stylistic choices draw you into their vision of New York – where squalor and grand design are aligned yet juxtaposed. This unique modus operandi, incorporated in 2015’s Abyssal Gods, continues on Spirit of Ecstasy.
The experience of Spirit of Ecstasy is one of exhausting aggression. “Merkurius Gilded” is an unlikely choice single, but no more likely than any other track. It’s a good showcase of Imperial Triumphant‘s brand of rampant chaos. They’ve always embraced using additional strings and choirs to clinch the fanatical mood, but perhaps not at this level before. Guest appearances from Kenny G and Max Gorelick add saxophone and additional guitars to the song’s first climax.
Even if things are a bit quieter, it’s no less intense. The free jazz inspired “In The Pleasure Of Their Company” provides a side-two breather in that it is instrumental, but its intensity rivals Electric Masada‘s metal-jazz fusion epics. Zachary Ilya Ezrin is excellent at penning riffs that are both twisted and satisfying, like on Metrovertigo, where the main theme stutters like a biting clutch. “Tower of Glory, City of Shame” has a section where the band fights against an entire cutting room floor of old-timey samples, followed by an unleashed bass solo.
The quintessential Imperial Triumphant passage is a chaotic segment, kept in check by some sort of blast beat or free-jazz rhythm, that sprawls through the centre of most tracks. At some point the galloping ends, and whatever fucked-up little ditty the band has prepared begins swiftly. “Bezumnaya” is a great example, in which surgically torrential drum work carries the densest textures (tortured vocals, spinning choirs, and wheezing trumpets), gradually terminating upon a staccato-noisescape.
Spirit of Ecstasy is undoubtedly some of the most extreme metal you’ll hear all year. It’s not a shoo-in for the well-known styles of death or black metal, let alone a mix of the two – the Avant Garde songwriting carves its own sonic frontier. Such irreverent music is challenging as listeners must grapple with a lack of hooks, something I’ve come to accept when taking on dissonant projects. Instead, listeners will be deriving satisfaction from sheer cacophony and complexity, violence and virtuosity – like cheering on the serial killer in a gory slasher film. This is true for Spirit of Ecstasy, and for all of Imperial Triumphant’s recent output, so to say that the record brings a lot of new ideas to the table is somehow not true. Still, don’t kick yourself if you’re not able to sing along and perfectly air-guitar to these tracks, even on your fifth-to-tenth listens – some puzzles are meant to be admired and not solved.
7.5/10
Spirit of Ecstasy will be released this Friday, July 22nd, via Century Media Records, and you can pre-order it here.