PLEROMA

Heritage-defining Gospel according to Pittsburgh's protean technical death metal outfit Orgone: an ambitiously crafted, genre-blind experimental drama of mental states and stations? all in the service of cinematically exploring the Christian concept of Pleroma, referring to the fullness of human existence. Challenging and jarring hybrid-material it might seem at first. It might grow on me, one might think but after repeated listens, the gorgeous orgone life-force substance has occupied all our receptors like Fentanyl. Death metal will romp and stomp and stampede with other voices, instruments, genres and styles and it will be for the better. Listening to this 65-minute-long metal odyssey, we witness death metal's existential confrontation with its oldest lacuna and source of a perpetual inferiority complex: namely that it defines itself negatively as anti-bourgeois, subversive and counter-everything, not to mention death metal bashers' derision for this primitive art form. With breath-taking filmic theatricality and a masterful sense of timing and restraint, Pleroma is going to collapse death metal into and let it crash with hundreds of years of other perhaps more wholesome, tuneful and truthful types of music (Classical, jazz noir, Slovak folk music, Ethno) -understood as equally valid existentialist expressions of the human condition. In doing so, another fullness of life is created. Luckily for us, there seems to be only one thing these maestros cannot do: not being hopelessly self-consciously musically aware of the Classical music they ingested. That this dense and challenging album would be a masterwork even if the circa 35 minutes long death metal passages were played as ordinary singable and hummable music is an added value and has made it already a golden sandpit for classical references (Bach, Bartók, Rachmaninov?) combers.

Along its unpredictably winding journey that eschews death metal for large parts, we come across a wide array of female and male voices, sung or spoken in various languages, ranging from soft and tender to harsh and genre-definingly unsentimental death metal growls and an instrumentation including chamber and brass instruments. The first two tracks take us seamlessly via a delectable though slightly off-key pastoral chant in French, a mournfully elegiac paeon to a better world, and the foreshadowing crescendo of the evocative post- metal-inclined 'Approaching Babel' towards the maximalist bombast of three and a half true abstract technical death metal concertos, ranging in length from ten to eighteen minutes. As the tapestry unfolds, further stations appear: seemingly self-contained filigree bijoux tracks of dolorous artifice and serene beauty which, upon multiple listens, will magically merge with arrestingly crafted melodic breaks and the heavily syncopated and contrapuntal chaos to come. The world has become a flickering kaleidoscopic, a panopticon of misery and hope in the penultimate song Schemes of Fulfilment. It is the final elemental storm of moods and grooves until all base genres that were never to be separated are alchemically transmuted in the turmoil of brass blasts, blast beats and ever-gushing musicality into noble purified and unified music. The future is open. Binary sectarianism has been overcome with the last song, Pleroma, with Colour the light! being shouted out triumphantly. Much is to be said about the interplay of the band members such as mere mortal multi-instrumentalist Steven Jarrett's unearthly musical bandwidth and blazing technicality. His bewildering twitchy but engrossingly catchy guitar idiom full of spewed out abstract micro-memes, brain-fryingly abstract, prismatic tropes, heard-breaking falling leaf patterns, dashed utterances and turbulences marked by inertia-free definition and calculation, unhinged ruckus-raising and earth-swallowing riffage and shredding are rarely repeated more than once but morph into or return in new guises which tend to carry melodies, grooves and breakdowns over in a very unique way. While Jarrett's aforementioned Classical panache and connoisseurship makes death metal's punch only harder, the interplay with the dense bass is tight and inspired and drummer and percussionist Justin Wharton's emphatic beats and onslaughts betray an expertly sounding out of very disparate and desperate emotional states. Any time signature change and complicated syncopation is handled with utter accomplishment. An incredibly delectable album of a lifetime. A melancholy and powerfully contemporary synopsis of what there is (to look forward to and still to listen to). It will make seasoned metal heads weep with heartbreak and feel like intelligent death metal users while open-eared prog enthusiasts will love the band's pushing against the universe.