Written By Kevin McSweeney
I’m going to start this review by quoting Will Yarborough, US press and media publicist for Season of Mist, directly.
By my estimation, Epigrama is the heaviest album that Season of Mist is releasing this year.
If you know anything about the Season of Mist label, and you’ll know all about them if you read our content regularly, then you’ll know that’s quite a claim. It is not without merit, however, and we’ll examine the evidence shortly. First, a word or two about the band…
Erdve, who hail from Vilnius in Lithuania, have been around since 2016, and have been signed to Season of Mist since 2017.
Epigrama, which was released on May 29th, is their third full-length offering, following their 2018 debut Vaitojimas and their sophomore album Savigaila, which was released in 2021.
The comparisons to their sound are with such bands as Nails and Neurosis, rather than simply with Crowbar, which is always my lazy go-to comparison when it comes to sludge.
The lyrics are in Lithuanian, which I do not speak. Luckily, though, the music is in the universally-understood language of Heavy as Fuck. Who needs the Tower of Babel when you’ve got metal?
The title track gets things underway with opening notes that, for a horrible moment, had me thinking they were about to launch into a cover of the Guns ‘N’ Roses song Welcome to The Jungle.
Thankfully, such fears were immediately allayed, as we were greeted instead by the sound of a great wall of clanking machinery, possibly in the process of manufacturing tanks or other forms of military hardware, overheating and about to explode with devastating consequences for everyone in the vicinity.
Will might be on to something, you know! It’s pulverising mid-paced sludge with pummeling riffs, sporadic bursts of machine gun double kick drums and a vocal performance from Vaidotas Darulis that sounds as if he’s been gargling Swarfega.
Occasionally, melody shows signs of attempting to break through, but ultimately it is held at bay.
I love the way you get the hint of a tune, threatening to shine brightly, but never quite managing to break through the dark, rumbling, thunderous clouds. It’s something of a leitmotif throughout this album.
Nyra commences with a speaker-shredding distorted bass tone over a solid mid-paced groove with the vague hint of a melody beginning to manifest itself.
It could almost pull the song into shoegaze territory, were the dreaminess of it not vexed to nightmare by the larynx-rupturing roar of Darulis.
Actually, can you rupture a larynx? I don’t know, just as I don’t know if I’m going to get away with stealing a phrase from WB Yeats, but we’ll go with it.
The droning but blisteringly heavy guitars in the chorus banish any notions of dreaminess. There’s an austere coldness to their sound. One could imagine it ringing out through a bleak and derelict abandoned brutalist post-war council estate.
I imagine myself face down in the middle of what used to be a shopping precinct as the track draws to a close, exsanguinating rapidly, with my still-living body being ripped at by rats and urban foxes.
You don’t get that from listening to Sabrina Carpenter, though I’d take bleeding heavily and being devoured by wild animals over listening to her.
Skepsis sticks to the mid-paced, shouty and searingly heavy template, which is understandable, as it’s served them well so far.
Though the intensity does not diminish, there’s some subtlety and nuance added to proceedings by Valdas Voveraitis, with his deft little ghost notes on the snare.
There’s an interlude, if you can call it that, around two minutes in when the intensity gives way to squealing feedback and an ominous distant pounding. It’s all very unnerving, sounding like a lull before the machine lurches back into life and tears you limb from limb.
The quarter notes on the open hi-hat counting us back in could almost be pistons. From then on, it’s like being struck repeatedly in the head with a giant hydraulic hammer.
Ydos apparently means “faults”. I found myself wondering if I’d switched to the wrong album by accident at first. Sure, it’s still dark, but there’s more of a vibrancy to this track, at least initially.
It’s driven by a kind of funkiness in the hi-hat work, giving it a bit of a nu metal vibe at first, kinda like Cold, if you remember them. It’s far heavier, of course, and still unremittingly bleak.
Even when it takes a turn as it inevitably does, there’s a staccato element to the riffing that keeps us rooted in the 1990s.
The double kick groove in the middle makes me feel as if my body is being sprayed with bullets from an AK-47, and it just gets more punishing from there.
Trukme means “duration”, which fills me with trepidation. What manner of brutality are we about to endure? The dissonant arpeggiated riff at the beginning is a kind of sop to those yearning for melody.
There’s a dissonance to the verse that takes us into post-hardcore territory, and a hint at a conventional chord progression in the chorus. I guess we’re looking at the album’s radio-friendly chart hit here, I say with no small amount of irony.
There is an eviscerating breakdown roughly two thirds of the way in before they taunt those in search of melody with another dark arpeggio, this time over a kind of hip-hop beat.
If you’re looking for an opportunity to dance during this album, this is it, but be quick, because it’s soon snuffed out by what sounds like the death throes of a mechanical dinosaur.
Svertas means “leverage”, and I can’t help thinking there’s something terribly prosaic about these titles, at least in translation, that marries up well with the concept of postwar brutalist architecture I mentioned earlier.
It’s all very bleak. Musically, this is a slow, lumbering beast of a track, snarling menacingly, throwing its immense weight against whatever structure is struggling to contain it. The quiet parts are ominous; the loud parts are vitriolic. We would be foolish to expect anything else.
Raukšlės means “wrinkles”. It’s a seemingly incongruous title in this context, an apparently whimsical subject matter that is at odds with the overt seriousness of the album.
Musically, whimsy is very much off the table. Having said that, this track is the first in which we’ve had an apparent resort to a four-chord progression, even if it is the context of such alarming brutality,
This brings us to our final track. Skleistis means “spread out”, which is an apt title for the last song on an album that has spread my brains across the wall.
There is a brief moment for sombre reflection at the start, before the bludgeoning power of those guitars kick back in. They must tune them down to somewhere beneath the floorboards, so weighty are they.
The quiet parts of the song are unnerving, due in no small part to the lead resembling an actual alarm. The loud parts are, as ever, the sonic equivalent of a breeze block to the bollocks.
Again, the chorus contains a hint of melody, but it’s snuffed out as soon as it arrives. It brings to a close an album that contains little in terms of variety, and not much light to go with the shade.
It is, however, a brutal, bleak and belligerent bruiser of an album that will delight fans who like their music abrasive and unrelenting.
There is an oppressive heaviness to this album, an immense and enervating weight that presses down upon you throughout.
Listeners of a less resilient disposition might need counselling before its near 43-minute runtime is up. I don’t like to get into politics, but a lot of bad stuff has happened in Lithuania, and not least during the previous century, when they experienced interference in their affairs from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
This album feels like an expression of the culmination of all of that. It’s a bleak, brutal and stupefyingly intense experience. I don’t know if it’s the heaviest album we’ll get from Season of Mist this year, but it’s going to take something spectacularly brutal to top it.
Metal Lair awards Epigrama by Erdve four out of five devil horns.
If crushing, oppressive sludge metal is your thing, Epigrama deserves a place in your collection. Grab your copy here.
Tracklist:
1. Epigrama
2. Nyra
3. Skepsis
4. Ydos
5. Trukmė
6. Svertas
7. Raukšlės
8. Skleistis
Line-up:
Vaidotas Darulis — Vocals, Guitars
Adomas Varnelis — Guitar
Valdas Voveraitis — Drums
Karolis Urbanavičius — Bass
Erdve Online
About The Author
Kevin McSweeney is Metal Lair’s resident scribe of the underground, eternally rummaging through the global metal scene for riffs worth your time.
As the guiding hand behind Seven Deadly Songs every Friday, he has an uncanny knack for finding the track you didn’t know you needed, usually before finishing his pint.
Equal parts loyal, kind, and quietly razor-witted, Kevin brings deep knowledge, impeccable taste, and a steady, reliable presence to Metal Lair.
Read More From This Author:
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