Cenesthesie: ‘Visceral’ [Review]
Fiction
His back stiff against the steel monolith, Frank struggled in vain to escape the wrist and ankle clamps that kept him in place. His head throbbed. The featureless white walls of his cubic cell met his gaze and stared back blankly. He had awoken here, helpless and physically unharmed bar the chafing of the unforgiving clamps against his bulky forearms and calves. His last memory was of the comforting glow of his computer screen as he slid on his prized studio headphones and pressed play. Now he racked his mind in a plainly hopeless attempt to come to terms with his predicament.
The noise – the same sound that had first awoken him – filled the room, though Frank failed to discern any spaces through which it could have entered. Inhumanly precise and infinitely dense washes of sound: black, bleak, and merciless. The throbbing in Frank’s head congealed into sharp, stabbing pains. Cognitive dissonance overwhelmed him. He could not think, reason, or feel any emotion bar pure, animalistic terror. As tears began to stream through his beard and drip onto the marble floor, the lights formed before his eyes.
Sharply defined static scintillations tore across Frank’s retinas. He felt his mouth open; his screams ripped raw strips from the back of his throat. But his voice could not be heard above the roar that enveloped him. Agonisingly bright sparks joined Frank’s personal firework display as the wall directly opposite him began to disappear behind a null grey cloud. The static flashes continued around the void’s edge as Frank began to convulse. He vomited, a pitiful amount of scalding bile trickling from the corner of his mouth. Within a matter of minutes (Frank supposed) his vision had been lost entirely.
Unable to discern his surroundings or feel anything except despair, Frank finally allowed himself to drift into unconsciousness.
All the way down, the all-consuming onslaught continued.
Opinion
This album is pure, unadulterated brutality. Clinical in its precision and airtight in its execution, it is nothing less than the metal world’s warped and twisted essence distilled into eleven harsh and unforgiving tracks. Absolutely not for the weak-hearted. European metal at its most direct and aggressive. An acquired taste (and, admittedly, one that I have yet to fully acquire myself), Visceral is nonetheless likely to be a wet dream come true for die-hard metalheads.
Links
Visceral is due for release on the 11th of September – but you can check out second track Genese on Bandcamp here: http://cenesthesie.bandcamp.com/
Follow Cenesthesie on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/cenesthesie
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