“From Life as Ash…”: Tómarúm’s Beyond Obsidian Euphoria
“…I have grown into the keeper of realms.”
When I first started listening to Beyond Obsidian Euphoria, the third LP from Atlanta’s Tómarúm, what I really did was listen repeatedly to “As Black Forms from Grey.” The penultimate track from 2022’s excellent Ash in Realms of Stone Icons, “As Black Forms from Grey” embodies the ethos of the album while also marking its high point. Around the 7:20 mark, the song’s fury drops away, an elegiac piano echoes all alone, soon joined by the wanderings of Arran McSporran’s fretless bass and Spencer Moore’s delicate drumming, before we are begged, “Set me free.” Universe-traversing solos spread astrally across machine-gun blasts. And thus we arrive at the song’s climax: over a full-speed blackened beat, we hear Kyle Walburn’s voice soar to the album’s highest heights as he sings, “Endless plight / I cannot bear to suffer more. Absent light / caught within this teething maw. Take me where / I may never hear a sound. Spirits rise / As I’m laid into the ground.” “More,” “maw,” “sound,” and “ground” are each inflected with ascending passion and descending heartbreak. It is the album’s emotional nadir cloaked in its musical zenith. We think we are climbing ever higher with those very spirits, but we are instead far lower, laid to rest in an eternal silence.
It’s not uncommon: as I was getting acquainted with a band’s new album, I would simply feel compelled to return to my favourite song of theirs, often interrupting any listen to Beyond to return to even just those last 4 minutes of “As Black Forms from Grey.” Really, though, as I soon discerned, I wanted the sadness of that moment, the swallowing of the teething maw, the finality of an endless plight. It is a moment of completion. “Yet no form lasts forever,” writes Ellen Wayland-Smith. “What do we call it once the eidos of a form is reached; once the thing a thing is supposed to become achieves peak thingness?” Without yet having Wayland-Smith’s The Science of Last Things (2024), I found myself wondering this very question about the band and their latest album. What is beyond “As Black Forms from Grey”?What does it mean to be beyond “Obsidian Euphoria”? For Tómarúm, this is precisely the thing they hope to answer. “Obsidian Euphoria” is not only a metaphor for self-destruction but, more potently, a way to poeticize the “pursuit of living a life beyond tragedy and defeat.” The very essence, then, of Beyond Obsidian Euphoria is what comes after you are laid into the ground.
Thus, the album cracked open for me. Beyond finds Tómarúm foregrounding “strength and vulnerability” in a hopeful, aspirational tenor, though never unaware of the unpredictable odyssey unfurling before them. The “passage of time / has opened a clandestine path / away from a life as ash,” we hear on album opener “In Search of the Triumph Beyond… (Obsidian Overture).” The song begins with such warmth, three guitars weaving together while Brandon Iacovella’s contrabass announces itself with dizzying runs that match newly recruited drummer Chris Stropoli’s rollicking rolls. Several levels of clean vocals persuade us to recognize the “burning of strength of spirit” that will melt our shackles. The brief moments of guttural vocals juxtaposed with clean string arrangements will surely bring Opeth to mind, while the similarly exploratory and inventive Ne Obliviscaris is a touchpoint throughout the song and album alike. Though the band might be at its most progressive and technically adventurous on Beyond, it is still not lacking for the might and vigour of earlier albums. Exemplary of the rest of the album, “In Search…” stitches together black metal aggression with proggy inquisitiveness.
Though we are armoured in hope and bolstered by a new form of belief in something better and beyond, we are still beset. “I’ve ensnared myself / in reality. The flame of healing / still distant and pale,” we hear on “Shallow Ecstasy,” one of the album’s most captivating tracks. Deftly switching between speeds, tones, attitudes, moods, and ideas, “Shallow Ecstasy” is beautifully tumultuous, a whirlwind of self-doubt and setbacks amidst a sea of evaporating-yet-still-present confidence. By the time “Blood Mirage” arrives—the album’s heaviest, darkest song, recalling as it does a breakdown-minded Hath—it seems that hope has vanished. We are pleading for memories of halcyon days to see us through. “Our sense of what a second chance is for us can only come from the past,” writes Adam Phillips. “So a second chance is at once a memory and a prophecy, a recollection and a hope.” In “Blood Mirage,” the word “halcyon,” actually shorn of its usual noun “days,” exists in this mythical interplay of opposite temporalities. Looking backward to look forward, we are in the treachery of nostalgia’s trap, of not knowing how to change, not knowing how to get better. As Stephen Greenblatt writes, “The dream of simply reentering the past and picking up where you left off… is a fragile and evanescent illusion.” In the very next track, “Halcyon Memory: Dreamscapes Across the Blue,” Tómarúm seems acutely aware of the danger: “These gently speaking halcyon memories / wavering my resilience yet shining bright through time.” We have left, for the time being, the brooding, sanguinary heaviness of “Blood Mirage” for lighter, airier territory. “Halcyon Memory” floats above us, hovering and gliding like wispy and whispering clouds in a blindingly blue sky. Co-founders Walburn and Iacovella stack on top of each other rangy, sunbursting solos as the band churns through deft palm-muted riffs. There is a tremendous amount of space to breath after the claustrophobia of the previous songs.
As she watches her friend Inseon “set a place of kimchi on the table,” Kyungha, narrator and protagonist of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (2005), realizes that “it can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness.” How consonant a realization with the heart of “Silver, Ashen Tears.” “The dissonance within these silver, ashen tears / guides me away from pain,” Walburn belts out operatically. Possibly the album’s strongest track, “Silver, Ashen Tears” is more reined-in than “Shallow Ecstasy” and heavier than “Halcyon Memory” and seems to find Tómarúm at its most comfortable. After a gentle acoustic passage, you can hear the band find that once-obscured fortitude. “I have found that which I’ve never known / solace and love exhumed from stone” is screeched over the album’s most triumphant riff, something almost Cascadian about it all. Or better yet, the band is touching an Alcestian grandeur, with backing vocals rising and falling in aching beauty before they are all that’s left to conclude the track. Glossing William James, Phillips writes, “To believe… is to live as if, to act as if, something is true; and only in acting as if it is true can you find out its truth, which can only be its truth for you.” The ending of “Silver, Ashen Tears,” is a moment of beatifying belief, a blossoming of golden exultation. If everything lies “past the final pursuit,” then it is nothing more nor less than a willingness to believe that will guide us there.
People will balk at the runtime of Beyond Obsidian Euphoria, perhaps at no instant more than staring down the 14-minute “Final Pursuit of Light.” Damn near an album unto itself, “The Final Pursuit of Light” is a distillation of Opeth’s Blackwater Park, a sprawling epic that strives so boldly to direct your attention after you’ve already given so much to the band. It is a song in which the listener can get lost, though the band provides mooring again and again, never letting you stray too far from the path you have chosen together. By the time “The Final Pursuit of Light” concludes and transitions into closer “Become the Stone Icon,” we feel a deep sense of relief, familiarity, and calm. We have grown to love these riffs, these keys, these motifs. It feels providential and divine. Too, there is indeed a reward, after it all: “A life full of newfound purpose / A desire to continue / shall rise stone from ash / I have begun anew.”
By way of concluding, we must return to Phillips and Freud. Echoing Kyungha’s kitchen-table revelation, Wayland-Smith’s thoughts on the passing and mutible nature of form, as well as the entire philosophy of Beyond Obsidian Euphoria, Phillips tells us, “At a minimum, as [Freud] put it in a late essay, he wanted in his therapeutic practice to pave the way for his patients to achieve ‘a reconciliation with the repressed material’ that manifested itself in their systems. That reconciliation might not be the same as a cure, but it could at least bring about ‘a certain tolerance for the state of being ill.’” Initially resistant to Beyond Obsidian Euphoria—addicted to, in a sense, my own symptom as narrated in those final moments of “As Black Forms from Grey”—I, ultimately, was able to find triumph in reconciliation, to move away from an addiction to or a refutation of that pervasive sadness towards a tolerance of it as a part of a longer emotional odyssey. It is, in this moment, almost impossible to harvest and to hold hope. What makes Beyond Obsidian Euphoria so impressive is that it both acknowledges that reality and insists on something else, something better, something beyond. “Beyond ‘Obsidian Euphoria,’ life begins anew.”
Beyond Obsidian Euphoria arrived
April 4 via Prosthetic Records.
You’ve probably already heard it!
But maybe you should really hear it.
