Track Premiere: Olkoth – “Alhazred”
You wake in a thicket, noticing first the illogical height of the trees and an uncomfortable weight on your stomach. Sitting up, you grab the leather-bound tome, wondering what sort of beast could be responsible for the strange texture beneath your fingers. The title reads Al Azriff, with no author given. Your hands move of their own free will, flipping a cover heavy as the lid of a tomb. The ground beneath you breathes, and you find yourself locked in place. A sound like buzzing insects fills your mind: We are the first, the exclusive premiere. We are Olkoth. We are “Alhazred”.
Squirming tremolo riffs breach the surface, tangled like mating worms. They start for your ears immediately, and the sensation as they crawl up your arms is not altogether unpleasant. As they pass through the canal, a cacophony of start-stop blasting echoes inside your skull, accompanied by the enraged howls of an entity torn from eons of sleep. There’s something hypnotic in the way its words drape over the low-end grooves and tech death guitars—facilitating a bridge between styles; worlds; lucidity and insanity. In the end, it’s a bridge quickly burned.
You are no longer. Electric voices shred the air, amplified through their chosen vessel. The myriad notes take on a feisty (Faust-y?) sense of melody, fitting for beings that toy with their victims from just beyond understanding. Soon the vessel is devoured, clothes and all, and the riffs return to the soil. The Al Azriff has gone now, to wherever such things go when their hunger is sated. Nearly everything in the copse is how it was just minutes ago, except the air is heavier somehow—sodden with souls that had never known the earth.
At the Eye of Chaos will be released on May 26th through Everlasting Spew Records. Say hi to Olkoth on Zuccbook as well!
