Thantifaxath - Void Masquerading as Matter

Thantifaxath, the anonymous and mysterious Canadian music collective, have reemerged from the silence after their thunderous and nihilistic debut album’s release in 2014 with a four-track EP that adequately echoes their debut’s blackened storm of hopeless despair and just slightly expands on it from a methodological standpoint. With its 35 minutes the EP carries its subjects through a dark, depressive void of black metal, sometimes ambient and pessimistically introspective, other times cacophonous and sadistic in its suggestion of the fundamentally solitary and discouraging nature life.
The opening track seethes from beginning to end in the revelation of impending doom or self-destruction, be it with blast-beat drumming and furiously picked dissonant chord progressions or its brooding piano section. Following it, “Self-Devouring Womb” screams of the succumbing to defeat of internal forces much greater than comprehension, against which any resistance is futile. “Cursed Numbers” brings perhaps the most novel experience on the album with the tremolo-picked guitars transitioning to haunting demonic muttering, to unsettling ambiance, back to wailing pull-offs that summon the crumbling of the sky into blackness. The eerie and increasingly tortured ethereal female vocals that close up the EP with the title track, while a little drawn out and arguably out of place, serve as an ominous musical cliffhanger for what would probably seem more in place at the end of a full-length journey through one’s inner fears and self-doubts. It is a fitting and well-done closing statement nonetheless and I sure hope it indicates that there is more horrific black-mirror-esque atmospheric black metal to come from Thantifaxath in the near future.

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