A grief-filled trajectory

On November 14, Chicago’s Withering Soul will release their 5th album, Passage of the Arcane, on Liminal Dread Productions. Balancing “crushingly heavy riffs” with “chilling melodies,” the long-running quartet play an exciting, energetic, and increasingly riffy brand of death-rimed black metal. A lifetime has passed since the band’s more gothic beginnings, but their melodic sensibilities and knack for majestic songwriting bolster the newer, heavier sound. In short, Withering Soul has never sounded better.

Thus far, we have been treated to lead single “Attrition Horizon.” The first proper track after a brief intro, “Attrition Horizon” blisters forth with aggression, confidence, and swagger. A galloping multi-guitar motif trades back and forth with a tremolo-picked riff over icy blast beats. Fans of Dark Fortress, Hypocrisy, and Darkthrone will no doubt be enthused. Once the band slows to a more methodical pace, a foreboding, ominous atmosphere settles upon the listener, the size of which seems endless. Around 3:00, Withering Soul has built to its heaviest, most destructive moment. From there, all that’s left to do is rush hell for leather to the end.

Moments like this abound on Passage of the Arcane, most notably in as-yet unreleased standouts “Grievance Eludes the Light” and “Trajectory.” For those cuts, you will have to wait. Fortunately, we’re stoked to bring you “Gallery of the End,” the album’s second single and one of its strongest efforts. A slower track, “Gallery of the End” bears some hallmarks of Hellenic legends Rotting Christ, settling into a cavernous melody among an almost gentle main riff. There’s something faintly NWoBHM about the leads and sensibilities, adding another dimension to the already wide-ranging track that also finds its way to a few choice headbanging moments. Founder, guitarist, and now main vocalist Christopher is at his most dynamic on “Gallery of the End,” showcasing emotional complexity and raging fury all the same. About “Gallery of the End,” the band has this to say:

‘Gallery of the End’ is a mid-tempo burner full of guitar-driven textures and dynamic mood changes. At the start, the listener is immersed in an aura of grandeur and mystery eventually being pulled into less hospitable settings. The instrumentation balances between punishing riffs and melodic closings. The lyrics are an echo of early settlements that carved out the path for modern comforts to exist. It explores the struggles, hardship and betrayal that would have challenged survival in isolated groups only to linger behind today in a shadow of crumbling structures.

Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida is, in some sense, a gallery of ends. Though the book begins with Barthes looking at an 1852 photo of Napoleon’s brother Jerome and takes up many artists along the way, much of the book is dedicated to a photo of the author’s dead mother when she was 5. Withering Soul’s “Gallery of the End” has a sense of the filmic or even palimpsest about it, with “a shadow of crumbling structures” forcing themselves out of history and into the present. There is a stuckness of history that retains something of the photographed image. Barthes writes of the photograph of his mother, “Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it. The circle is closed, there is no escape. I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift; no culture will help me utter this suffering which I experience, entirely on the level of the image’s finitude.” This finitude, this frozenness-in-time, disrupts the ability to move from grief to mourning, the ability to begin to heal, whatever that may mean. In providing us with their own “Gallery of the End,” Withering Soul makes their own case for closed circles, inescapable and motionless suffering, and a cosmic inability to ever do things differently.

Feel for yourself:

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Passage of the Arcane arrives
November 14 via Liminal Dread.
Check out that sweet Adam Burke artwork.