Aseity

By the name of this band and only by it, the listener can understand that the music that is going to listen to by this bandit is, at least, special. So, Esoterica were formed after the split – up of Chaos Moon, in 2011, they consist of three members and until today they have released two EPs, two split, one demo and one full length album. Aseity is the first full length of the band which was released in September of 2013 and it contains six tracks of forty four minutes of overall duration. As I mentioned before, by the name of the band and the cover of the album, I understood that here I will come across psychologically “sick” Black Metal. So here we come across barbaric, paranoid, raw, chaotic Black Metal, which many times is walking into ambient and noise paths.

The music that the band wants to present is based on the dark, misty atmosphere that they create, despite on the technical riffs or the complex compositions. What the band creates surely is dark, “sick” and “ugly”. Into the tracks there are fast, chaotic riff which are noisy, heavy and dirty and combined with the noise elements they become even more thick and chaotic. Moreover, the listener will also listen to a lot of slow – Doom riffs either into passages either into entire tracks like Lethe. Into these parts, the noise elements are absent and their place is taken by the ambient ones which make the atmosphere darker and more intense. That combination reminded me of Demoncy and Krieg. The duration of the tracks is long (from 5 to 12 minutes) and their structure is not so good, so that there are some repetitive and some tedious parts that they ruin the atmosphere that the band has created.

The instruments generally are somehow blurry and lost behind the misty music that they create. The guitars in the fast parts are dirty and bass while in the Doom ones they are quite clean. The bass is not audible at all. The drums have interesting lines with changes, fast outburst and turnings, they are played with accuracy, stability and power. The vocals can’t be heard clearly enough and they are heavy, distant Black Metal vocals which with changes depending on the part, add intensity to the compositions. The production puts out a very dark, dirty and blurry sound. I think that that kind of sound fits to the style of the band although in some parts it loses the balance and becomes somewhat tedious. The mixture almost doesn’t exist as the sound reminds the sound of a recorded rehearsal that there has been no intervention in the studio. The lyrics are written in English but they are not contained into the promo that I received and I don’t know what they refer to.

I think that the first full length work of Esoterica will somehow divide the listener. On one hand, there are beautiful riffs that combined with the ambient elements they become even more interesting and the atmosphere is so heavy and thick that makes the listener feeling trapped into it during the listen. However on the other hand, the duration of the tracks and their moderate structure makes them tedious many times for the listener. Also the moderate production and the nonexistent mixture make the listen difficult in some parts. In general it seems that the band has some good ideas which maybe need to be worked more in order to give the desired result. The fans of the chaotic, ambient – noise Black Metal listen to it.