Track Premiere: CONCILIUM‘s “To Dust”
The council has convened.
On May 5th, 2023, Portuguese black metal lunatics Concilium will release via Sentient Ruin their third full-length LP Sky Bvrial. Named after the ancient Himalayan ritual of taking the deceased to the highest peaks of the mountain range to be dismembered and consumed in sacred burial grounds by scavengers only to return, gruesomely yet purely and respectfully to the sky, Concilium’s new album is a nauseating, vertiginous affair that drops the listeners from the Himalayan heights into the demonic depths on every track.
First single “Between the Moon and the Mountain,” which was premiered earlier this month by Last Rites has an old-school punk flair to it, with a constant two-step snare beat prodding the track along as solos squeal out from hellish unknowns and the song’s main riff—nearly catchy for how mangled it is—churns along with total abandon.
Here at Toilet ov Hell, we’re thrilled to premiere exclusively “To Dust,” Sky Bvrial’s 4th track and one of its most exemplary. As with “Between the Moon and the Mountain,” there are otherworldly solos floating in and out of the background, but the punky break of “Between the Moon and Mountain” has been replaced with swirling, chaotic blast beats. Teitanblood fans will find much to appreciate on “To Dust” and the rest of the album. As you found with those Spanish behemoths, there is so much dread filling almost every inch of Concilium’s music. It also spends enough time flirting with death metal aesthetics to juice its black metal backbone. The atmosphere here, as on all of Sky Bvrial, is indeed sepulchral. It’s entombed. It’s foreclosed. It’s stench-ridden and decomposing. But it’s still an atmosphere—it’s still an environment in which one might live and/or die. In astronomy, an atmosphere surrounds a heavenly body. In the case of “To Dust,” a flaming, noxious black metal dirge, it is that wretch-inducing atmosphere of the decaying, decomposing, and picked-over body sat atop one of the world’s grandest vistas into which Concilium has invited us against our wills.
I’ve always appreciated, ever since my early days of discovering Sentient Ruin bands, how so often they walk that razor-edged tightrope of un/listenability. Peel off the layers of “To Dust”—pull back its skin to reveal its entrails—and you’ll find its heart to be more intact, more graspable and coherent, than you might think. Until next week, slake your thirst on the blood of “To Dust” before tucking into the even mightier tracks of “To the Skies You Will Return” and epic closer “Ov Flesh and Bone.”
Sky Bvrial will be out on Sentient Ruin
next Friday, May 5.
The album is available vinylly, cassettely, CDly, and digitally.
Make sure you take a look at SR’s permanent sale, as well.
