Premiere: Enter Xoresth’s “Vortex of Desolation”
You ever get that sinking feeling, as if the entire world around you is just being sucked bone dry by a yawning chasm of endless, soul-crushing social anxiety? You know, that feeling where the boughs of the trees outside your window droop a little lower, the sky roils in an endless sheet of grey, and all the conversations around you seem to dim and vanish to the periphery like the remnants of some vestigial sense your treacherous body has deemed no longer necessary for your miserable persistence? Yeah, we’ve got an explanation for that. You’re just hearing the big endless suck of Xoresth‘s wretched doom. I’d do my usual song and dance here to tell you I’m pleased as hell to introduce you to the premiere of a killer new track called “Vortex of Desolation,” but this song has really got me down, and now I’m passing those bad vibes on to you.
It’s hard to stand out in a genre known for despondency and languishing time signatures; your parents probably wouldn’t consider it much of an achievement that you were the saddest kid in a group of loners, and yet a cosmic sense of frailty is exactly what I seek when I listen to funeral doom. Thankfully, Xoresth delivers sadness on exactly the right scale to drive home the satisfyingly inconsequential nature of everything, and the Turkish quartet does so on new album Vortex of Desolation with a surprising sense of urgency.
Urgency may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of doom metal, yet it’s the only label that tastes just right (in the worst sense) in my mouth. The booming, reverberating percussion rolls over you with an oppressive malice that makes your heart yearn for a release from suffering. The grating, grinding guitars, reminiscent perhaps of Yhdarl or Hyponic, cruelly strangle a wilting keyboard line that desperately attempts to escape the overbearing gloom throughout the song’s run time. Unfortunately for that lovely bit of melody (though perhaps fortunately for the doom heads in the crowd), that keyboard line never quite makes it out, smothered beneath a torturous vocal performance courtesy of both Eduard Utukin and Karahan Karaoğlu that positively swallows the light.
Can you recall the last time a funeral doom song left you so listless, cold, and down? Do you remember hearing a funeral doom song so urgent in its disregard for humanity that it made you want to charge headlong into its Vortex of Desolation if only to get one last glimpse of solace before eternal silence?
Yeah, me neither. Press play below.
Vortex of Desolation is out July 22nd via Grimm Distribution and Satanath Records. You can pre-order it here or here and blame the band for your depression here in the Zucksuck.
