Black metal, death metal, industrial metal: Matron Thorn has always manipulated their contours creating extreme and visionary music. ÆVANGELIST are perhaps his best-known musical incarnation, today stationed in Finland and shared with singer Stéphane Gerbaud (Anorexia Nervosa).
Featuring MY DYING BRIDE’s Aaron Stainthorpe as a guest vocalist on one track, “Perdition Ekstasis Meta” is the pinnacle of Thorn/Gerbaud’s new ÆVANGELIST, a monumental space opera of industrial blackened death metal. The album moves in the nightmarish, chaotic and dissonant groove typical of a genre that the band has helped to refine, but with a more pronounced melodic vein which translates into greater immediacy and expressive awareness. This explains the sonic richness and the imposing architectural constructions of “Endura,” “Wicked Flesh to Spirit Sublimate” or “Ekstasis Divinæ,” often crossed by formidable piano/synth scores that elevate the avant-garde component of the album to the nth degree.
As always, behind the blanket of hallucinatory guitar layers and the shattering, glacial rhythms that sustain them, hides all of Matron Thorn’s mal de vivre, perfectly fitting with an album concept which hybridizes science fiction, theology and evolutionary theories to tell the story of an artificial God, born to guide what is left of humanity through a spiritual carnage in the form of a new Apocalypse.
ÆVANGELIST’s “Perdition Ekstasis Meta” is an annihilating, twisted album that will challenge the feeble-minded. But then again, long and tortuous it is the road to damnation, a just reward for those who dare to walk the industrial wastelands of a new dark age.
Incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming
FFO: Abyssal, Blut Aus Nord