MAMALEEK "KURDAITCHA" (Enemies List Home Recordings)

Visceral and isolated bedroom black metal courtesy the excellent label Enemies List, purveyor of bizarre and alienated artistry related to outward disgust and loner mentality. Mamaleek honors that ideology with purpose, releasing an album of intensely personal black metal vision while still retaining enough of the crucial elements to evoke the harshest vestiges of the genre. Guitars are destructive and completely blown out, ripping shards of painful serration through the blanket of complacent existence while tortured vocals scream and shred from the depths. Reminiscent of the finest of suicidal black metal, these screams come from forgotten places of swarming emotion, the cry for help from anywhere beyond hearing. Oceans of torment and inward-focused loneliness and isolation erupt, but this isn't suicidal or depressive in the slightest. This is just fucking raw.

The biggest weirdo element here is the drum programming, bringing to mind the stumbling dub-patter of trip hop rather than the endless onslaught of double bass heavy black metal assault, creating an atmosphere of minimalism and space as opposed to the brutal claustrophobia the majority of black metal demands. Keyboards waft in and out, tinkering pianos drop themselves into the mix like icicles and everything screams of dry despondency, as if to accuse everyone of forgetting. There are those who exist in the hollows, those who ride the fringe, those who believe only in their own hollow sense of self and the sadness inherent in every new breath drawn. Modernity is a source of destruction and torment, a force that drives the meek underground and away, ever further removed from the obviousness of expectation. Mamaleek is the cry from beyond, the knife in darkness, the stinking rush of adrenalin in the blackened alley of the everyday. This is stumbling, eviscerated black metal, shewn from the bone of genre and cut into something entirely personal. The grayed out aesthetics and purgatorical reflection both speak to the malaise permeating the heart of modern life, the sorrowful banality dominating the core of modern being. There isn't much room in the corners, and the disgust piles up like so much sawdust and flaking skin. Dreams of desert prophecy linger and fall to the earth while stale winds caress the dirt. Swirling airs of regret and regression sting the eyes and force hands up against something unknown but familiar, and evocation of territories once inhabited but always lurking in the shredded memory of before.

Pain and dust walk hand in hand throughout "Kurdaitcha." Mamaleek take the template of black metal and draft something vaguely new from elements both foreign and remembered. It's a highly personal statement crafted from the dark harbours of withdrawal, a mirror dripping with oil and tears. The future doesn;t exist, the past is dead and the now is simply an endless ticking of the clock. There is nothing left here, only dread, and anxiety, and the stench of regret. Hands grasp for both contact and hope and come up empty, the slimy tendrils of reality slipping through grips both desperate and hungry. What's left? What matters? How much hatred can you pour into 40 minutes?