By: Conor O’Dea
Album Type: EP
Date Released: 09/02/2018
Label: Redefining Darkness Records
“The entire EP is unrelenting and relentlessly riff-dense, at once
brutal, joyous and, dare I say it, punishingly fun.
Highly-caffeinated and intelligent death-encrusted black metal; recommended
wholeheartedly. I can only hope that there is a full-length in Mendacium's future!”
“Decimating
Titans” CS//DD track listing:
1. Decimating Titans
2. An Invocation for Bloodshed
3. Eviscerate
4. Make No Grave in My Name
2. An Invocation for Bloodshed
3. Eviscerate
4. Make No Grave in My Name
The Review:
Daniel
Jackson is a man of prodigious talent, possessed of an expansive and deep
musical vocabulary. His project Void Ritual presents a melodic and grandly atmospheric
approach to black metal; there are bold and sweeping passages of sorrow and
mourning, of victory and triumph throughout the battlefields and icy
wastes conjured in the skald-worthy sagas of “Holodomor” and “Heretical Wisdom”.
This is not to suggest that Void Ritual is in any
way lacking in savagery; it is rather a filtered savagery that uses war as one
of many compositional features along its complex musical topography.
This dilution of violence in Void Ritual is inverted into pure warlike alchemical distillation in the new EP by Daniel's other musical project Mendacium, aptly entitled “Decimating Titans”. For me, the double entendre of decimation wrought by the Titans as well as that wrought upon them by the revolt of their offspring are both gratifyingly scored by this short and devastating 4-track album. Blistering must be one of the most overused words in metal reviews, but damn it, I am not sure there is a better way to describe the opening and unrelenting full-clip salvo of the opening (and title) track here. Almost instantly bursting into onslaught, this song feels like the autobiographical account of endless slaughter, each verse punctuated by a chorus that can only be likened to the gloating over the corpses of enemies.
This dilution of violence in Void Ritual is inverted into pure warlike alchemical distillation in the new EP by Daniel's other musical project Mendacium, aptly entitled “Decimating Titans”. For me, the double entendre of decimation wrought by the Titans as well as that wrought upon them by the revolt of their offspring are both gratifyingly scored by this short and devastating 4-track album. Blistering must be one of the most overused words in metal reviews, but damn it, I am not sure there is a better way to describe the opening and unrelenting full-clip salvo of the opening (and title) track here. Almost instantly bursting into onslaught, this song feels like the autobiographical account of endless slaughter, each verse punctuated by a chorus that can only be likened to the gloating over the corpses of enemies.
“Invocation
to Bloodshed”
bears a deeply magickal resonance in its structure, evoking whorls of high
theurgic energies, complete with preparatory chants and refrains, line by line
moving the spell towards its final, devastating release at 3:11. The next
track, “Eviscerate”, may, in fact, be an account of the
bloodletting unleashed by the ritual of the second track: it cuts a bloody
swathe through its 4 minute path, an unforgiving barrier of spinning blades
that leaves no living being alive in its wake. “Make No Grave in My Name” functions as an excellent tombstone to
this blood-soaked metal mausoleum and reminds me, for obvious reasons, of
Robert E. Howard's short story “Dig Me No Grave”: "Then, even as we cried out in horror,
it was gone and our dazed gaze met only the shuddering walls and blazing roof
which crumpled into the flames with an earth-shaking roar."
The
entire EP is unrelenting and relentlessly riff-dense, at once brutal, joyous
and, dare I say it, punishingly fun. Highly-caffeinated and
intelligent death-encrusted black metal; recommended wholeheartedly. I can only
hope that there is a full-length in Mendacium's
future!
