Obelyskkh, “The Ultimate Grace of God” video premiere

Steve Paradise on “The Ultimate Grace of God”:

The Song ‘The Ultimate Grace Of God’ is about all those too many people who care about only themselves, thinking they are the crown of creation. But they are wrong. This role is, by the grace of god, already taken by us. We tried to express that in the video. And we think that was impressively successful.

Album preorder: https://shop.mainstreamrecords.de/product/eom104

Avant sludge doomers Obelyskkh are set to issue their fifth full-length, The Ultimate Grace of God, through Exile on Mainstream on Jan. 27. Lurching, slamming, willfully unmanageable and abidingly miserable, it runs seven songs and 71 minutes and is the follow-up to 2017’s The Providence (review here). While I don’t know over what period of time it was recorded — days, weeks, months, years, or some outside measurement that takes into account the horror-and-bad-pills-filled dimension the three-piece are working in — it was wrought at Mach Ma Mecker Studio in Breitenguessbach with production by Moe Waldmann (who also mixed) and Seeb Gerischer, mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege, and the scope of its component material is matched by how densely packed it is. So that not only are Obelyskkh pulling you over rocks for over an hour in ritualized fashion, they’re doing so with surprising efficiency considering all the atmospheric stretches of drone, changes within the individual songs, the collapsing universe around us about which we only continue to know less, etc.

Lyrically speaking, “Aquaveil” (8:30) might be a love song, or it might be about dropping acid, but it starts with what sounds like a kid playing amid apocalyptic winds before a rolling, driving riff takes hold and the first vocals arrive, sounding utterly disgusted. Obelyskkh — guitarist/vocalist Crazy Woitek, drummer/vocalist Steve Paradise, bassist Seb Duster — will come back again to this kind of “eww look at that” delivery throughout The Ultimate Grace of God at various points, and it becomes an underlying thread drawing the songs together along with the bitter, sometimes grueling, churn of their grooves and all-brown psychedelia that overlays.

Following the stomping verse and low speech eerily moving across channels, the first of many layered solos sweeps forward, and “Aquaveil” returns to that initial shove riff and moves into gruff incantations over lumbering crashes before coming apart at 3:40, letting the fuzz bass and drums set up a return for quieter guitars. It’s a build, and not necessarily slow, but not hurried, and kicks into more lumbering, almost Electric Wizardly, or at least Ramesses, but twisted, after the five-minute mark, delivering its title in what feels like reverent repetitions. This too will be a theme as the title-track follows, but first, “Aquaveil” lets a non-lyric “ahh” become a layered wash, cosmic as much anticosmic, the guitar’s threat never far even as they seem to be fading and the drums carry a layer of effects, the guitar fades out, rises up again in a dual-channel solo, the vocals gross-howl — moving toward and past seven minutes now — but eventually stop alongside the drums and a low frequency drone becomes the most dominant element, synthy ambience arriving but leaving quickly in the fade.

If one would look to “The Ultimate Grace of God” (9:55) to help solve some riddle, don’t bother. This is post-modern, the name comes from a hair salon, nothing means anything, take a scrub-sponge to your mind and rid it of the crust of expectation before you get dishpan hands, existentially speaking. If you can’t bask in absurdity, first, how do you survive?, and second, you might as well go back while you still can. The title-track is quicker into full volume at its outset, the drums plodding behind a start-stop riff that comes to be topped with dramatic, echoing guttural layers before two verse rhythms start happening at the same time. Is that Paradise and Woitek? Maybe, but this record isn’t about to go around explaining itself for you, so you’re better off accepting the mystery. In any case, the affect is overwhelming, one voice barking at you to look at this beautiful face, the other cultish moans faux-worshiping the wretchedness of beauty and excess as described in the lyrics.

It’s class warfare, and right. fucking. on., but Obelyskkh aren’t necessarily bound stylistically by these bourgeois concerns. Some of “The Ultimate Grace of God” reminds of mid-period Neurosis — unless that’s just the way the word “grace” seems to echo out — but they move from that manic dual-vocal back to start-stops to cycle through again, breaking into standalone guitar at about 4:45, wistful and classic rock in all but its layering, snapping at 5:41 into a heavier embodiment of the same part, now triumphant. Synth, or guitar effects, or horns, or something, add to it ahead of more left/right soloing, and the title-track makes clear once and for all the bleak, drugs-and-drear vision of prog that Obelyskkh are fostering. A xylophone shows up, purposefully grandiose, purposefully over the top, and they ride that movement as long as they ride anything throughout the entire album, slowing gradually around eight and a half minutes in, drawing out by nine, and making no attempt to hide their intent, finishing at a still-cohesive crawl until the last crash leaves a residual rumble behind.

“Black Mother,” which follows, is the shortest inclusion at 5:46. I haven’t seen a lyric sheet for it, so I won’t speak to the intention behind the title, but from what I can glean listening — and mind you these things don’t always come through with the utmost clarity on a record so prone to delivering headfucks — it’s at least not directly about race, i.e., a Black woman with a child. If I’m wrong and it is, or if I’m not and it’s not, the more important question is what ‘black’ portends in terms of the song itself, and that’s what I don’t know. There are lines about ‘Blissful mother’ protecting children and her own soul and ‘bewitcher and destructive lord’ (?) amid a nodding, counted-in riff, chugging in the verse, etc. After two minutes in, they shift to ’70s horror organ and another riff emerges behind repeated pleas to “Break me apart” and “Open me up,” the song growing more intense as it pushes deeper, not quite a traditional build, but increasingly urgent anyhow. They stop, jangle-chug to hold place with noodly lines overtop, build in with the ride cymbal, then they’re heads-down in shove, crashing quickly into a slowdown after four minutes, bringing back the cult-chant vocals, layering with shouts, before the stomping ending turns back to the beginning chorus in a surprising bookend. Had to end somehow, and fair enough.

The first of two songs over 14 minutes long, “Afterlife” (14:26) is a culmination for the first of the 2LPs and like its side D counterpart, an album unto itself. Noise drone starts, guitar enters slowly, sparse but setting a progression in motion. At 1:35 a clearer figure arrives over the noise, which starts to spiral in rhythm then evens out again. The lead line is sweet ahead of the full-on crash-in at 2:49, giving way to lumbers and drags that are hypnotic before galloping forward with the verse. A drum switch to hi-hat/snare from and then back to ride cymbal makes a difference in energy behind the same riff. The sound of Paradise‘s hi-hat there is sharp and biting, and the vocals are in that disgusted modus like “Aquaveil,” before cutting, getting quiet but staying tense as “Afterlife” moves past six minutes, building back up as signaled by drums and ferociousness of the guitar layers.

An oddly timed march is introduced at about 5:45 and starts in earnest around a minute later, the track full of unexpected turns like The Ultimate Grace of God. At 7:23, the same movement surges louder and that’s just fine. An echo-coated but nonetheless more traditional verse, gives over to psych-sludge shouts and drawls, two voices intertwining again, before a guitar solo takes hold at 9:09, layered again but righteous. All seems to be rolling along smoothly enough, so Obelyskkh pull the rug out from underneath and shift into Khanate crashes over empty space, becoming furious quickly — we’re past 10 minutes in now — until a snare hit quick-turns back to the galloping verse, crash, then hi-hat — this is a band with a marker board in their rehearsal space — repeating the song’s title in lyrics. A current of feedback builds after 11:30, the crashes become consuming, looped, the vocals open wide and swallow the song until after 12 minutes it’s a noise wash. The drums crash and everything else kind of fades away save for feedback and effects drone, synthy manipulations; caustic noise rising, receding over that drone, and then gradually the drone fades too. Death in “Afterlife.”

If that was the record, you’d probably call it complete, but the point here is that being digested by cruel aural antireality takes time and Obelyskkh aren’t about to loosen their grip. The Ultimate Grace of God might be ‘epic’ were it not so poisonous. Either way, there are more terrors to come as they engage the seemingly-purposefully-paired “Universal Goddess” (6:28) and “Dog Headed God” (9:26) — interesting that the two shortest tracks are about women idols/archetypes — land ahead of the finale. “Universal Goddess” has a creeper riff at its outset before the drums kick in and ends up using feedback like a sustained drone, cycling through four measures before turning to the next onslaught-take on that breaking-fragile-things rhythm, moving to a chugging march to offset as a transition to the feedback fading, a clearer, starker line of guitar used as backdrop for gothic-style melodrama in the vocals, laced with whispers of the title-line, a particularly religious-feeling call and response, like at a mass.

This seems to trail off but then “Universal Goddess” bursts to life before the halfway point, grueling vocals dug into lyrical paeans to the titular deity. There’s a noise rock jabber of a riff that’s given its due before it straightens out to a run and obliterates itself just after five minutes in, and from there, the sludge freakout is on. A layer of feedback noise returns, becomes the constant, then the drums crash out and the riff stops and the song ends with what sounds like the speaker cabinet howling in agony, or maybe worship. “Dog Headed God” comes on as immediately more together, and is already into what will become the weighted shove, into the first verse before hitting the one-minute mark. Obelyskkh dare a bit more melody in the layering, saying the title-line deep in the mix compared to the verse.

A churning riff pushes “Dog Faced God” forward — the Anubis reference clear — then there’s a sudden turn just before two minutes to a riff established then fleshed out with fuller fuzz. It stops, turns, attacks, and when the vocals sneer the line “My soul is pure,” before the layering and whispers start, the threat is real. They march and swing for a while, some shoutback response make the stretch even less lucid-seeming the second time through. Not quite a chorus, there’s shouting over the churn: “God of the dead/With a dog god head/Claws of red.” They turn back to churning verse past halfway, hits around on crashes and takes off again with “God of the dead…,” growing more distraught and witchy. I’m not sure if it’s percussion or keys/synth or another layer of guitar, but the ensuing movement is topped with weirdo bloops and beeps, as the song behind becomes even more out there and decay-stenched, manipulated and pulled apart molecularly while the drone of synth remains. Keyboard and sharp noise after eight minutes set the final haul in motion, but it’s all noise from there on out. They aren’t coming back. It ends: electronic stutters and the drone, then just the stutters, like a helicopter far away, then nothing. Mindfully praising chaos.

From this silence arrives “Sat Nam [Vision]” (16:49), the longest track on The Ultimate Grace of God and arguably the most ritualistic, despite abundant competition.

Pops of electronic or other noise over drone at the outset — maybe an answer to the end of “Dog Headed God” — and there’s a deep inhale (is that you,  drugs?), another, a cough. Thus the stage is set for trip to find universal truth, or at very least the unmaking of all things. After all this ambience, they crash in just before two minutes, finding semi-angular lumber, then proggy bounce, the bizarre chanting given suitable instrumental accompaniment, straightening out to horrifying lines about being saved. A layer of sub-caustic synth, like you just dialed the wrong number to one of those galaxies billions of lightyears away, backs more headfuck vocal layers thrown at you. A relatively quick transition results in, “I am the way the way, the truth, the life,” delivered like Monotheist-era Celtic Frost, back to the bops and that drone, a turn back to this chorus, layer of death growl or throat-singing underneath, nodding crash, coming apart as these parts do, capping with the keywords “way, truth, life” repeating over timed crashes.

There’s a moment of respite — surprising, considering — to “Sat Nam [Vision]” after five minutes as it oozes to feedback and drone, then on to throat-singing, cymbals, some other percussion, and the vocals reveal themselves as making a mantra of “Sat nam,” chimes and bowls and a noise like running water that isn’t comprising an atmospheric backdrop, also an undulating waveform drone. They’re not yet halfway through. A programmed beat starts circa eight minutes in, the chant still looping at first goes away before guitar reenters at 8:34, the bed for a low semi-spoken verse with keys prominent amid rumbling and light-plucked guitars. More layers are added for the repetitions of “be buried in oblivion” after a second cycle through that verse,  and just after 10 minutes, Obelyskkh move into a more guttural, “I was living in a sat nam vision,” the slow roll behind almost cinematic. This too is stripped away to just “sat nam” spit out, and at 11:48 another vocal layer enters and brings lead guitar lines, creating a fray that comes and goes around various “sat nam” repetitions.

It’s dramatic as it song moves toward the 13-minute mark, but feels like it’s drawing down, then noise drone rises over ’80s horror vibes, snare bends time deep in the mix. Lines of piano and guitar complement each other like they don’t know the world’s over yet, and eventually they go and the noise finishes and the album finishes and everything is finished, you, me, the mantra of one god that is “sat nam” and all else. Exhausted and undone, the closing piece of The Ultimate Grace of God leaves on a fast-fading line of guitar after a long stretch of drone, and if that’s the last bit of consciousness receding into the grim ether that’s been at the heart of Obelyskkh‘s work all along, that submission is well earned by the extremity, the oppressive reach, of the band’s tonal, ambient, conceptual heft and the experimental scope of their purposes. Too molten to be just-brutal, The Ultimate Grace of God is an accomplishment in bringing together such disparate notions of what makes music progressive, and its warped otherworldliness is visionary in the challenge it issues to its audience. If you can meet it on its level — and if you’re still reading, I’m not going to claim to have done that — it has the presence of dogma dragging you down with it. And to where?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2023 at 6:09 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.