Also they are streaming Sentinel, the second track on Embraced.
Unusual creative processes such as Surachai’s have produced genius-level black metal, but they’ve also given us the kind of irritating pomposity that Velvet Cacoon’s “dieselharp†hoax skewered so artfully in the mid-aughts. Embraced fortunately avoids the latter. The compositions wriggle through transparently American contortions, but their motion is fluid rather than jerky.
This curious sense of smoothness comes largely from Guzzlemug drummer Charlie Werber, whose playing is Embraced’s most outstanding feature. I asked that IO stream “Sentinel†because it’s the best showcase for his unconventional style. Werber’s strokes-per-minute count is way up there with the master blasters, but the way he uses all of those notes is utterly different; instead of mapping onto a staccato grid, they blend together into a dizzying swirl that breathes as it seethes. When I first heard the term “burst beat,†I imagined a sound like this one, though Liturgy drummer Greg Fox never came close to executing the idea convincingly. Werber is a different story, and I’ve never heard anything quite like it.
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