Review by Sandre the Giant
Centipede Abyss have been kicking out some of the weirdest and most brutal records at the moment, and their newest release will be Lux Sine Lumine’s self titled effort, due out March 16th. It says for fans of Khanate and Nadja in the promo stuff so this is likely to be some harrowing noise/sludge/doom? Let’s dive in.
Opener ‘Heliopause’ is immediately unsettling, dissonant notes and atonal chords lurk in a miasmic ambience while a slow, grindingly doom riff rumbles underneath. The guitar vanishes into creepy sounds, a sinister, almost tapping comes through as a slow yet inexorably rising drone begins to permeate the noise. There’s a lot of Axis of Perdition here, waves of distorted clanging sounds echoing around this work. ‘TrES-2b’ has a real churner of a riff to start, but then slowly begins to fall apart into odd noise and ambient portions, before that guitar comes back with a truly sickening tone to it. There’s a little Boris to that particular tone; a fuzzy drone piece that is followed by the discordance of Lux Sine Lumine’s whims and their experimental takes on sound. Closer ‘AR Scorpii’ is where I think the band get to a point where they are comfortable to create something really experimental. There’s very little of what feels like traditional instrumentation, or even any impetus to create something remotely palatable, and you’ve got to respect it.
At first I assumed that Lux Sine Lumine was going to be more of the dissonant death metal we’ve seen before on this label, but ‘Lux Sine Lumine’ bucked expectations by becoming one of the year’s most harrowing and sinister records, despite its short runtime. It is a work in which I admittedly felt lost and disturbed, but I think that;s what made it stick out so much for me. As a music record, you may struggle, but as a work of pure sound manipulation, it is real real good. If you liked Geino Yamashirogumi’s Akira soundtrack, you may find quite a bit to like here.
The Killchain 