Premiere: Get Crushed By Ataraxy’s “One Last Certainty”
Get your first taste of the finest death/doom 2018 has had to offer thus far…
The year has only just begun and many of us are still riding high atop the crest of 2017’s ceaseless wave of death, its white peaks crashing over the barriers into the new year, spilling its contents onto fresh sands. The first album crossing the border and sprawling out across the new terrain is Ataraxy‘s Where All Hope Fades. I guess what I’m trying to say is you are but a mere grain of sand, prepare to get wet.
Anyone who kept up with listmania season will know how revered last year’s Spectral Voice debut was around here, the album easily coming in as the #2 fave on our TovH Staff AOTY List. The rising death-doom act successfully plumbed the vast chasms created by seminal bands of the style such as Disembowlment and Rippikoulu, proving along the way that the subterranean void still has black liquid gold yet to be mined.
So why am I mentioning Eroded Corridors Of Unbeing here?
Well, mostly because the albums certainly share some superficial resemblance, however it is perhaps their contrast rather than their common ground that is most interesting. If Eroded evoked introspection through a theme of spatial dissolution, Ataraxy seem to be outwardly focused, looking towards the skies as they usher in complete temporal unravelling.
The song we are featuring here today (‘One Last Certainty’) is track 3 on the album and is somewhat of an outlier in that it is one of the shorter cuts, featuring perhaps the most straight-forward death metal approach to song-crafting on the release. The Martin van Drunen-esque vocals are complimented nicely by a few Asphyxian riffs, however a closer comparison might be drawn to the similar but slightly more doom-flavoured acts such as Ancient Crypts or Solothus, albeit with a much more refined lilt. ‘One Last Certainty’ is also the only track to not contain one of the emphemerally recurring clean passages, which are astutely intertwined amidst the prevailing cosmic storm throughout the rest of the album. These sections lend a very distinct gravitas to the record, eliciting a sort of paradoxical feeling of cyclical progression; time’s arrow curving along in an undulating wave as it traverses the plane of the unknown. If you like your death metal to come in monolithic slabs, replete with stratified layers of riffage and soul-crumbling weight, then Ataraxy have you well covered.
Pre-order your copy of Ataraxy‘s Where All Hope Fades from Dark Descent Records on Bandcamp or their webstore ready for its February 16th release date.
Find Ataraxy and Dark Descent on Friendface.
