Epistasis "Light Through Dead Glass"

Country: USA
Sub Genre: Avant Prog, Black Metal, Doom, Progressive Metal
Label: Crucial Blast
Release date: April 1, 2014
Tracklist: 

1. Time's Vomiting Mouth 04:10
2. Finisterre 06:02
3. Witch 05:25
4. Candelaria 03:29
5. Grey Ceiling 03:05
6. Gown Of Yellow Stars 04:20

Line-up: 
Amy Mills - Trumpet, Guitar, Vocals
Kevin Wunderlich - Guitar
Alex Cohen - Drums
Doug Berns - Bass

Description/Reviews: 

With this new collection of songs, the band has evolved into something much darker, the music shifting from passages of moody, understated atonal melody into blasts of frostbitten discordant blackness and lurching, angular riffage. Beginning with the crushing, doom-laden dread that opens "Time's Vomiting Mouth", its yawning blackened heaviness glazed in a glistening electronic sheen, the band quickly erupt into paroxysms of jagged black metal-esque violence. Amy Mills's ghastly scream drifts vaporously behind those twisted, lurching grooves and blackened blasts, often trading off with the gorgeously ghostly sound of her trumpet bleating in the darkness, strains of spectral jazziness echoing through the depths beneath the band's complex, metallic assault. These subtle jazz-informed touches are met with the furious drumming of Alex Cohen, also a member of avant death metallers Pyrrhon and NY death metal titans Malignancy; his aggressive performance on "Light..." give these songs a churning rhythmic intricacy that even seethes beneath the band's more atmospheric moments. And "Light..." has plenty, from the eerie guitar strings that lilt across the opening minutes of "Finisterre", gradually disassembling into a haze of fractured folkiness before blasting into another swirl of savage blackened discordant metal, later giving way to mournful guitar melodies that cascade across the latter half of the song in limpid sheets of elliptical beauty; to the haunting ambience of "Grey Ceiling", all layered in those bleary horn tones and smeared jazzy drift. The more black metal influenced aspects of Epistasis's sound seem to be informed by the likes of Ved Buens Ende and Virus with a similar tendency towards difficult, off-kilter riffing and odd melodic shapes, and when the guttural chaos of "Witch" appears, there is almost a hint of some of the murkier, more abstract realms of death metal, but this is only barely glimpsed before the band hurtles into the further reaches of psychotic vocal delirium, blasts of controlled chaos and deformed out-jazz horror that make up much of this disc.

Much like label-mates Ehnahre, Epistasis craft an unconventional, complex sound on "Light Through Dead Glass" that suggests just as much kinship with the darker and more malevolent realms of prog rock (Univers Zero, Present, "Red"-era King Crimson) as it does with the more outré fringes of black metal, delivering a kind of nightmarish dissonance shot through with scenes of shocking surrealistic violence and flashes of phantasmal beauty. 

Media/Samples 
Bandcamp

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