...according to our Business Lady on Thu 23 Apr, 2009.
Servile Sect serve up two sides of blistering psyche fuzz with a healthy serving of black metal vocalism on new LP the 'Stratospheric Passenger'. They cover a lot of bases on the record, at time they play the rousing ambient route which is almost pleasing in its delivery yet is soon pummeled to death by layers of death riffage and twisted nordic style black metal vocals. The mood shifts and swings schizophrenically from majestically uplifting lilts to crushingly brutal lows. Sonically the record sounds awesome, guitars buzz and howl, electronics snake in and out of the mix and the vocals are fully hobgoblin-esque, nasty yet still slightly amusing (much like the best of the black metal vocalists). A recommendation for fans of Burial Hex, Alcest and maybe Fuck Buttons.Servile Sect are the true investigation of psychedelic dimensionality. ... bizarre, and hauntingly beautiful slab of alien black metal. Not sure what else to call it, it's definitely black metal, but it's weirdly blissy and electronic sounding, more like Alcest or Amesoeurs than old school grimnity, but even then, it's still weirder, like it must have been played by robots or insects, or some massive black metal machine assembled beneath the surface of some mysterious moon. You can almost picture some mechanical monstrosity, pieces of human flesh, various organs, somehow built into the machine's inner workings, everything grinding and sparking all in a Herculean effort to produce this glorious droning buzzing blackness. A cloud of black buzz that will eventually drift through space and time swallowing any planets in its path, and extinguishing all life it encounters. Heck, even the cover of the record is the view from some sort of alien lander, looking out and the cold dead ground of some red planet, as if any minute some huge horrible black beast will lurch into view over the horizon, dashing all of our ideas about said planet being uninhabited.The sound of Servile Sect is epic, and majestic, the guitars glistening sheets of sound, the surface of that sound peppered with bits of electronic shimmer, causing the long drawn out riffery to reflect and refract, tiny little sonic events occurring every second, the surface alive and constantly squirming and changing color, but viewed from afar, it's simply a blown out undulating buzz. Those guitars are digitized and processed, spread into thick smears of warm glowing whir, the riffs barely discernible beneath the constant roar of Servile Sect's sonic swirl.The vocals add just more buzz to the mix, howling and wailing, but stretched into streaks of sonic violence, and drums, assuming there are any, are buried, festering beneath layer after layer of crushing guitar fuzz, emitting noxious rhythms that don't so much blast or pound as they do explode into tiny squalls of still more buzz.Occasionally, the buzz abates, leaving the guitar to sway lazily, the notes ringing out, the guitars lurking in the distance, but it's never long before the lilting melody is engulfed by a colossal buzzing roar, and the band locks into another extended psychfuzzblackdrone.
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