Caged - From Roving About the Earth
There is something especially disconcerting about Dystopia’s use of sound collage. Blending samples from television, film, and the radio amidst their music, they are an unshakable reminder of a world just outside the door as bleak as their music portrays. Suicide is chalked up to the devil’s influence, poverty hand waived, and the environment disregarded. All real, and all haunting as they drive the point home.
On From Roving About the Earth, Caged employs many of the same tactics to add weight to their lofty blend of power electronics and blackened doom metal. Perpetually ugly as is, the point is always undercut by evangelical ramblings and bible thumping vitriol. Indulgent manipulation warps each sample further, twisting their ideation into sound as virulent as their bigotry.
Opener “Isaac in Rope” begins with one such sample. As the misguided, devout pleading devolves into an array of squelching noise overlaid with further sampling, Caged arises from beneath it. Blackened sludge the likes of Wolvhammer lurches atop rolling double bass before dipping into subthermal tempos. As Caged settles more deeply into their groove, the power electronics bombardment emerges from beneath the murky depth to provide a squealing contrast to the bass heavy array.
“Held Still Under Running Water” flips the script as an impregnable wall of noise is foregrounded. Dancing atop the low-end rumblings of an all-out sludge assault, the power electronic contributions are always critical and never caparison. Noise and metal are as one; always building from one another rather than segmenting and seccluding. The result is as cacophonous as it is sonically misanthropic. Reminiscent of Rwake’s sparser stylings as much as Lord Mantis’s onslaught.
Caged, however, is beguiling. Underneath the oppressive bog of power electronics and robust distortion lies an ear for groove on par with the formidable Admiral Angry. On “The Messiah Draws Near” and “How Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels” sludge’s archetypal blues riffs are preserved in amber. Sneaking in amidst death-doom wailing and intrepid drone, the fossilized works of Eyehategod sets From Roving About the Earth apart from so many peers that practice heaviness for heaviness’s sake.
As dense as they come, From Roving About the Earth is a staggering follow up to 2020’s Stricken by Continuance. Thematic meditations on the perversion of religion as a tool for intolerance are explored sonically and lyrically through opaque blends of power electronics and unrelenting blackened death doom and sludge metal. A surprising ear for melody amidst the clamoring wails of the apocalypse accentuate it all and make it as valuable to fans of Iron Monkey as fans of Primitive Man.
