Deadspace - Dirge

After a slow 2018, releasing only an EP, Deadspace have returned to quickly stake their claim on 2019’s metal landscape. 2018’s Mouth of Scorpions found the band recapturing their creative glory after the mild slip that occurred from Reaching for Silence to The Liquid Sky. The band certainly weren’t bending any rules or pushing any boundaries of the kind of ambient black metal they played, but Mouth of Scorpions at least found them sounding more vital and less camouflaged into their genre than the previous year’s LP did. Based on what that EP presented of Deadspace last year, I had a few hopes and expectations for whatever full-length project was to come next from the industrious Aussies. I was hoping the band would remain revitalized and carry the momentum of the EP’s emotional potency over into this year’s LP.

Conceived as the thematic and stylistic sequel to 2015’s Promise of Oblivion, Dirge ended up taking a very different and unprecedented turn for Deadspace. Departing from their occasionally melodramatic blackgazey DSBM, Deadspace took one a far more harrowing and fearsome aura more along the traditional black metal side of the DSBM style than what they usually present. And it ends up being such an unexpected improvement as Deadspace outdo themselves with what I think is their best LP yet. The band didn’t just veer off onto another musical trail of which they had no knowledge and resort to copy-catting Leviathan or Gorgoroth or whoever might help them fit in somewhere they don’t belong, nor did they shed what has made them an interesting band within ambient black metal. Rather, the band took their full arsenal of cathartic blackgaze talents and marched headlong into the darker territory of the style and made expert use of it without it coming off as forced or formulaic. The band clearly know what they’re doing with the more overbearingly depressive side of the genre and they do well to play fittingly to maintain the unfliching atmosphere that gives the style its appeal.

The most immediately noticeable difference is the far more bestial vocal style that characterizes the album compared to records past. It’s one of the most natural transitions I’ve heard to this kind of vocal style, and the way the instrumental style transitions so smoothly certainly aids in it coming across as authentically as it does. And this is partly because the band never really abandon their old sound either. The integration of both sides of that measure on the DSBM spectrum could easily have been executed choppily or been completely ham-fisted, but the seamlessness with which Deadspace weave back and forth between their more melancholic older sound and this more overly sinister sound is rather impressive. The band manage to capture both the visceral mental anguish that acts like The Body or Hell love to cultivate, as well as the kind of hair-raising, meditative enlightenment that comes from blackgaze at its best.

Right out of the ominous ambiance of intro track, the song “Rapture” sets the more menacing tone of the album with walls of black metal guitar dissonance, pummeling bass drums, and more rabid, echoing screams than ever before. The song still makes its way through some more heartfelt guitar leads and even a piano section, proving that Deadspace can maintain their grasp on their old blackgaze through this much harsher black metal storm they whip up. The title track is a brilliant, well-named combination of cavernous, slow-paced agony trudging through a windstorm of sharp dissonant tones and abusive percussion. I love the simultaneous melancholy and agony of the album that the band makes so potent on this song. The band just made so many smart and well-measured compositional choices all across this album, another of which being the smooth piano interlude they include in the middle of the track list. It’s pretty well-placed and serves well to give the album a temporary cool-down before its subsequent explosion into its second half without feeling like a merely passing the album’s time and killing its momentum.

The more straightforward, aggressively depressive moments on the album are pretty fantastic as well. The ride-cymbal-accented “Indoctrination” is one of the more directly deathly and unforgiving cuts on the album, whose short stay is perhaps its one weakness, being a song that feels like it could reach even higher echelons. I also especially love the fast, harrowing, and darkly celestial intro of “The Malevolence I’ve Born unto Others” and the ethereal, double-bass-backed string section it soon leads into, and the ominous hushed growls of dark premonitions that lead into the more sorrowful climax of “Consigned to Oblivion”. I love the sorrow that’s carried over into the melodic guitar leads on the next track, the more beautifully somber “Hypnogogia”.

The album’s closing track, “O Sancta Simplicitus” is a fantastically cinematic conclusion to the album’s dynamic experience, stretching out in all the directions Deadspace covered on the songs prior and wrapping everything all together in one terrifyingly depressive and heart-wrenchingly sorrowful climax.

This January sure felt like such a shit month for mainstream metal releases especially, but this was a nice way to close the month out. This album caught me quite off guard, and in a way I have become very grateful for. The fierce, frightful atmosphere that persists throughout the entire record is not what I expected from the band, nor is it something I would have expected them to conjure so masterfully so quickly. Deadspace still aren’t really pushing any genre boundaries, but they are doing so well to craft something so special in its potency and unique in its feel with this combination of sounds they make use of, yielding their best album to date. Laying such diametrically opposed angles within black metal on top of each other in an intricate fashion such as this, Deadspace have more than made up for the bit of slump that The Liquid Skytook, and made an album that truly demands to be experienced and immersed in. This year is definitely looking to be another phenomenal one for mainstream metal with Slipknot, Gojira, Periphery, Devin Townsend, and (allegedly) Tool slated for releases this year, but for now, Deadspace has my favorite album of 2019, and one that will be hard for even the big names to beat. This is not just a high point for an underground band, this is a confident statement of their importance and one that commands respect and consideration alongside the greatest of the band’s contemporaries. I can proudly say that I knew Deadspace had something truly special in them when I first heard Reaching for Silence, and Dirge has confirmed my predictions of them reaching an even brighter future and fulfilled my hopes of what they could achieve. But really it’s the band who deserve to be proud for what it is they have achieved here. Congratulations to Deadspace, what a fantastic album!

great expectations/10