Pestilential Shadows - In Memoriam III Omen

September 29, 2009

Reviewer: Matt

Pestilential Shadows, a fairly young black metal group featuring prominent members of the Australian extreme metal scene, unleash their third album on their third record label.  In Memoriam, Ill Omen is anything but groundbreaking, but the moody melodicism and strong songwriting (not to mention the really great cover art) and its sophisticated, informed worldview warrant a recommendation.

So called “depressive black metal” has a well established formula - juxtaposing the Norse black metal aesthetic with the melodramatic suicide rock of early Katatonia - and Pestilential Shadows stick to it well.  While early progenitors of this arguably mismatched hybrid, such as Shining, have gone off the deep end and are drowning in their own indulgences, Pestilential Shadows dedicatedly toe the line, alternatingly approximating the compositional techniques of “My Journey to the Stars” and “Skald ov Satans Sol”, with thankfully no detours into Opeth territory and only occasional brief references to The Cure.  The riffs are fairly commonplace, but the composition is moderately more dynamic, noticeably more complex, and substantially more thoughtful than that of this band’s peers.  In Memoriam, Ill Omen, for all its genre trappings, is a very well written album.

The unabashed exploitation of somber and mournful melodies, which some may see as perverse and antithetical to the spirit of black metal, will nonetheless resonate strongly with listeners, as it does with me, and is sufficiently honest in its convictions and averse to maudlin angst to be deemed authentic and escape derision on aesthetic grounds.  Pestilential Shadows explores our dread of imminent death and mourning for dissolution of self and, accordingly, our sardonic disgust at the self-serving, willful blindness of religious belief and its pathetic manufactured false hope for eternal bliss.  And though black metal at its best strives for more transcendent expression, and to those who face death boldly such themes appear contemptible and trite, Pestilential Shadows approach their task with enough craft and nuance that the themes are elaborated with sophistication and clarity.  As such, themes that in the hands of lesser composers are weak, senseless indulgences into our basest instincts and fears are instead revealed by this band as erudite studies of our multidimensional struggle against the abyss.  Most impressively, Pestilential Shadows aptly avoid condescending to their audience by leaving the conflict unresolved: no admonitions to suicide, no declarations of war against the believers.  In Memoriam, Ill Omen invites the listener to appraise death honestly, and it excels in that it provides a medium through which to do so that is Socratic rather than pedantic.

In Memoriam, Ill Omen is a strong effort in a subgenre often unwarrantedly subject to puritanical criticism.  Pestilential Shadows stands heads and shoulders above the “depressive black metal” crowd, rivaling the integrity and quality of even the earliest and most notable expressions of the sound.  This is the rare black metal album that invites the listener to accept our impotence in the face of death and to study it without shame and with great attention, rather than clothe it in a façade of anger or, even worse, romanticize it as a star-crossed Shakespearean love affair with the cosmos.

Release Date: June, 2009
Label: Pulverised Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Weapon Against the Sun
2.  Beautiful Demise
3.  With Serpents I Lay
4.  Of Loss and Suffering Inherit
5.  For Man and Heavens Ruin
6.  Sundered
7.  Ecclesia Moriendi
     (Instrumental)
8. Bathed in Ashes

Total playing time:  44:16

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