Track Premiere: Saevus Finis – “Corporeal Malfeasent”
Descend into Hell.
When Diddy said, “Can’t stop. Won’t stop,” he very much must’ve been talking about, in a clairvoyant or premonitional way, the indefatigable Transcending Obscurity Records. On January 12, Transcending Obscurity will release Facilis Descensus Averno, the debut album from Portuguese newcomers Saevus Finis, a trio of battle-tested extreme metal musicians coming together to create a “vindictive,” “asphyxiating,” “blinding,” and “overpowering” form of death metal that draws from twisted black metal as it does from the broader world of brutish dissonance. Over on the Saevus Finis’ bandcamp, you can treat yourself to three tracks of “dark, hypnotic” death metal that boasts a “menacing blackened edge.” Saevus Finis fits uncomfortably somewhere along the spectrum of Transcending Obscurity labelmates Maere, Viande, and Burial Hordes, while also calling up from the darkest depths of Morbid Angel and Incantation.
Today, we’re stoked to bring you an exclusive premiere of Facilis Descensus Averso‘s fourth single “Corporeal Malfeasent.” A song that is certainly a crime against the body, a transgression one can only feel taken out against the safety and wellbeing of one’s physical self, “Corporeal Malfeasant” spends the first few minutes in a twisting and contorting dysmorphic black metal. The double bass is constant, the snare hits keeping a languid yet steady beat. Mortvorvm’s vocals sail back and forth easily between higher and lower registers. There’s a madness lurking at the edges, but it seems like we might escape. That is until 2:49 when we’re thrown headlong into what the band themselves call “the utter dissolution of morality, an extreme experiment and witnessing of the depths of our ego-dystonic… an infested sonic terror that will curse [us] all.” Such an apocalyptic riff, which churns and churns and churns, calls to mind Suffering Hour and their ilk as well.
In her 1967 essay “On Morality,” Joan Didion taps into something of a deformation or convolution of morality that bears some relation with Saevus Finis’ philosophy. Without ever naming it, or, rather, naming it in her Californian way “wagon-trail morality,” Didion seems to revere the kind of morality that Antigone demanded and for which she died in Sophocles’ play. For Didion, the right to bury one’s dead is “the only kind of ‘morality’ that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning.” Later in the essay, Didion will write, “It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with ‘morality.'” Didion’s mealy-mouthed Goldwater conservatism aside, she, a la Saevus Finis, is deeply suspicious of moral claims that go beyond the only moral claim—the right to proper burial. Saevus Finis, however, go one step further, and you can hear it in the absolute disregard for the listener throughout Facilis Descensus Averso. That is, even if we were to grant one grand morality, one that trumps all other mendacious and twisted and strained moralities, even this is something for which Saevus Finis has no respect.
So, lose all your morals and hit play on “Corporeal Malfeasent” below.
Facilis Descensus Averso
will be available on January 12 via
Transcending Obscurity Records.
You can pre-order it for
one U.S. Dollar right now.
In fact, all pre-orders on TO are $1.
In double fact, all already-released albums are Name Your Price.
Go pre-order everything and buy everything else.
And buy me one of those absolutely sick red-sleeved Saevus Finis raglans, why don’t ya?
