Gnaw Their Tongues — Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus
Maurice De Jong's compositions are extremely well thought of and carefully planned, yet they cause a feeling of total and overwhelming chaos in the listener. All the tracks are very "cinematic" and descriptive, very much alike classic instrumental music, and their structure reminded me a bit of the few things I listened to by Krzysztof Penderecki. I'm no expert of classical or contemporary academic music, but I think this Gnaw Their Tongues' record shares more common ground with experimental composers of the near past (Xenakis, Berio etc.) than it does with our dear corpse-painted Scandinavian heroes. The closest black metal comparison in terms of song structure and ratio between "empty" and "full" sounds must be the highly praised "Fas - Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternum" by Deathspell Omega, but even that doesn't really come close.
Maurice's vocals are completely unintelligible and mangled by effects, turning them in nothing more than an instrument to mix with the others. The synth work is excellent and variegated, and it carries the ears on an hellish, emotional rollercoaster. I think that this incredible keyboard/synth emotional and compositional mastery is the strongest point of "Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus": it's not easy to create such an enticing and hypnotizing web of sound, and it's a great pleasure to discover new details at every new listening session.
Bass is maybe the strangest element of the album, with its completely erratic dissonant improvisations and its sudden bursts of cacophonic black metal destruction. The plain weirdness of Gnaw Their Tongue's take on bass and its placement in the structure of his tracks is close to some of Peter Frohmader's bizarre compositions like "Nekropolis" or "Cultes Des Goules".
The digital drumming is very primal and menacing, and it perfectly punctuates and enforces Maurice's grotesque pieces. The use of samples is mandatory in this kind of work, and Maurice's choices definitely add to the disquieting and bleak mood of the album.
Fun trivia: I think I recognized the images used in the artwork of this CD as taken from a black mass-inspired short porn movie which is supposedly from the 1920s.
"Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus" is definitely not for everybody, and I warn metal fundamentalists to stay away from this CD like it was the black plague. Gnaw Their Tongues' music demands lots of attention and effort to be appreciated, but I think it's definitely worth it. I feel like I missed out on something good and interesting for a few years.
Recommended to anybody who's up for a very bizarre and genuinely unsettling listen, and to who's not afraid of genre boundaries being torn to pieces. The album is also available in double 10" vinyl format from the Belgian label ConSouling Sounds.