Track Premiere: Invultation – Severed Umbilical Chaos
What witchcraft is this?
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a prominent sentiment regarding the tenor and weaponry of a now-possible (now-probable?) fourth World War was being shared by or attributed to people as various as anonymous Army lieutenants to the far less anonymous diasporic Jewish, non-Zionist, socialist-sympathizing, German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. The sentiment was thus: nobody knew what weapons would be used in the third World War, but the fourth World War would feature sticks, stones, and/or spears. The pithy quote–“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”–has never been connected directly and authoritatively to Einstein, though several sources gesture towards such exchanges. Whether Einstein said it directly, indirectly, or simply referenced a broader post-war anxiety about the proliferation of evermore devastating nuclear weapons, the idea can be interpreted in two not unrelated ways: either (1) World War III will obliterate humanity as to effectively reset the clock on any sort of “progressive” or “linear” evolution and return us to the literal Stone Ages or (2) the level of inhumanity evidenced by the crimes of both World Wars already demonstrates that atavistic evolution is not only an entirely plausible scenario of Darwinian evolution (as H.G. Wells spent much of his career novelizing) but a path down which humanity has already well begun.
This is the philosophy from which is borne the Columbus-based one-man project Invultation. Hailing from the heart of the Buckeye state, Invultation play a form of black/death metal that forsakes the utter chaos and shoddy, lo-fi production values of the more “bestial” sides of the subgenre for a more controlled bedlam that features robust production, thick guitar tone, old school black metal grooves, and blisteringly fast-but-still-grooved-out death metal a la Immolation or Incantation. Throughout Invultation’s forthcoming record Feral Legion, sole member Andrew Lampe (Wakedead Gathering, Echuskya, LONGBARROW) paints the ugly picture of “[a] time in which humanity’s prolonged obsession for power through dominance has reduced the world to a lightless and inhuman prehistoric dark age where primeval animalistic instincts of survival and a complete lack of sanity are the only ‘logic’ reigning.” The illogics of this palimpsestic past/present/future war conjure up images of grotesque monsters with giant tree nuts for heads and clad in crimson and silver armour, leading hoards similarly mutated soldiers into battle with wolverine-human hybrids as over 110,000 post-climate Midwesteners (those with the only potable drinking water left) rabidly cheer on their betting favourites in whatever decrepit shambles is left of Ohio Stadium. Truly, few can imagine such a horror that will surely be known in a near post-literatre society as The Game.
Fortunately for us here at the Toilet, we do not have to imagine such a tragic future alone. Today, we are thrilled to debut the lead single for Invultation’s Feral Legion, the raging third track “Severed Umbilical Chaos.” A perfect encapsulation of the rest of the record, “Severed Umbilical Chaos” eschews the “chaos-for-chaos sake” ethos of the genre for something far more palatable and powerful. The guitar riff that begins around 1:34 amidst a constantly shifting and blasting rhythm attack soon becomes, in all its malformed glory, the crooked backbone of an unmitigated neck-snapping breakdown.
This willingness to drop out of an unsustainable frenzy into a corrupted sense of straight-forward stomping is the formula for destruction at work on other album standouts such as “The Howling Convocation,” title track “Feral Legion,” “Lower Beasts,” and “Mark of the Fang.” It is very much to the band’s credit that they harness these more traditional black and death metal tropes in their quest for uncivilized domination.
For those who have already gone through the process of invultation (or invultuation, as the OED reminds us) and find themselves, thanks to some incidious witchcraft, morphing into nasty Nittany lions, barbarian badgers, ghoulish gophers, terrible terrapins, horrible hawkeyes, wicked wildcats, or bestial boilermakers, you can check out Feral Beasts when it arrives via Sentient Ruin Laboraties on August 18. That’s not even a month away! You can wait that long, even if you’re some sort of hedonistic hoosier or scurrilous scarlet knight.
