Review Summary: Bow’d down in battle, sunk before the spear / Of despicable foes
Erected at the outset of Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Pandemonium is Hell’s chiefest landmark, and the capital of that dismal waste.
The Luster of Pandemonium could suggest the allure of its lighted cressets in the dark, or the sheen of its golden halls, but Crimson Massacre’s
Luster is equally ideological. The true enticement is defiance of divine order, and it divides this record against itself in perpetual bloodshed.
The opening of ‘Catalyst’s Tongue’ – buffeting percussive blasts and the riff that careens between them – is an almost incomprehensible struggle, melody less a driving force than an insurrection. Open war ensues. It rends the ‘Sacrifice’ into jagged bursts, and so encumbers ‘The Devourer’ that it can only groan in strife. Faced head-on,
The Luster of Pandemonium seethes. Structure, when we chance to glimpse it, wrestles mightily with a depraved clamor, and at every twist its hold grows more desperate still.
But the chaos never triumphs wholly. Leading lines blaze free of the cacophony, their fervor and fire pressing back the sinful din like unquenchable Seraphim. Each races on, wings peeling blackened feathers, pared, frayed, and swallowed by the very dissonance they sought to transcend. Tech death transitions are often rhythmically fluid or utterly erratic, and
Luster leans into this disarray as a means of visceral storytelling.
Suffer, now, the vitriol of ‘Redemption’, dizzying crescendos defeated at every turn by a theme that tears at itself even as it stomps all others to dust (with a chilling vow that “their ignorance will be repaid tenfold”). Chronicle this ‘Epoch’ in its pinwheeling path, harried and hounded only to rally in a final charge, wielding “a smoldering brand, pressed against the flesh of time” and heralded by the gallop of
Luster’s most glorious groove. “Cast down your spears! Break your shields! Tear your wings!” – does the eponymous chapter flaunt victory or lament defeat?
This interplay forms the arc of
Pandemonium. Each rabid bark underscores another shift in the tide of battle; each stuttered rhythm, a failed gambit; each fractured strain, a futile strike. Dynamism, almost fittingly, that is betrayed at every turn by the album’s presentation. Its dual guitars are smothered and buried. Drums are either artillery blunt or pure muck. The bass, we venture, perished ‘ere the day was out. All are bannered by an illegible logo and imagery of equal inarticulacy. Clarity in excess would serve no better, but
The Luster of Pandemonium is impenetrable enough without these useless barriers.
In a release so marred and tumultuous, any phrase of passing stability is rendered at a terrible cost – save one. ‘The Hyperborean’s Epitaph’ cleanly divides
The Luster of Pandemonium in two, both structurally (as the album’s centerpiece) and sonically (with undistorted and unaccompanied guitars). It begins simply, plucking and sidling nearer, patterns complicating as they tinge with melancholy. Melancholy gives way to uncertainty, and uncertainty to resignation, until at last only a single stringèd voice wanders in ominous involution. This is the respite of the defiant. Poisoned by revolt, doomed to torment,
Pandemonium sprawls in the gloom, and beckons.
