Blasting eardrum-shattering technical death metal might seem like an antithetical means of clearing the mind and finding peace but I’m in the mood for trying new things, and sometimes an enormous wave of a song, crashing down upon the soul and rushing the mind’s processing of stimuli, is the precise antidote for a proverbial cloudiness in the head.
Is this the reason then that some love death metal? The absolute abandon of the brain while it’s being so beautifully bombarded into oblivion through the sheer pounding of a sonic fit of wrath and rage?
This selection is from the band Obscura, whom I stumbled upon when researching this Winter Obscura theme – and it arrived at moment when I needed to assault my senses with something different, something jarring, something jolting, something more…
A slap out of it, a shock wakening, a reckoning to ravage… a desperate act to feel again, to reset the mind and reboot my entire system when Control-Alt-Delete no longer does anything.
I didn’t want melody, I didn’t want lyrics, I wanted only sounds – tons and tons of deafening sound – pure sonic abuse and attack – aimed directly at my chest – so loudly that I could feel it there, pounding away from the outside while my heart pounded back from within. Sound so striking, sound so strident it feels like skin being ripped off the body. Sound so potent, sound so petulant it spits in your eyes and probes uninvited into every orifice of your body. Sound that turns you inside out.
Is this the sound of Winter Obscura? Too soon to tell… but it’s the sound for today.
