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Esoteric: Paragon of dissonance

27/12/11 || The Duff

Funeral doom is definitely not my style of music; I listen to Esoteric, Ahab, Evoken and I have the one Catacombs CD which is, given the right frame of mind and lighting (basically no lighting), one of the most frightening listens of my sweet, innocent almost virginal existence. Out of all these, I would rate Ahab’s “Call of the Wretched Sea”, Evoken’s “Antithesis of Light” and Esoteric’s “The Maniacal Vale” as peaks of the sub-genre, this band’s last record some of the most depressing, tortured music I’ve heard delivered via a rich, vivid concept about madness to the loss of time. Or summink. It made my balls curl, is all I can say.

“Paragon of Dissonance” is certainly not short of admirers, which makes me happy in some ways as I can write this with little consequence and as such even less remorse; Esoteric are a band with fantastic potential, but I can’t find much of the absolute mastery of “The Maniacal Vale” on this new record. Where “The Maniacal Vale” was fluid, not exactly a riff-salad but a great blend of crushing and twisting, maddening soundscapes, “Paragon of Dissonance” just seems to amble along with no clear direction.

Esoteric aren’t breaking much new ground here – “Paragon…” sounds like a rushed “The Maniacal Vale” in that the compositions don’t gel, and the album is less a fine blend of texture but rather layers of contrasting noise. Musically we have the same drawn out, angular, harmonized leads, the same build-ups into musical dementia, the same clean, haunting guitar parts with shit-tonnes of reverb, despair, sorrow and swirling distortions, simple riffs that depend on the down-tunedness of the guitars to sound like the walls are caving in but Jesus’-tits do they work to their purpose (an open lowest string on this album will afflict your bowels like nine pints of dodgy Kronenberg and a curry – take the end of “Non Being”, for example), all with exactly the same, hollowed out, ominous production although I would say on “Paragon…” it’s drier and less all enclosing.

Unfortunately what made “The Maniacal Vale” so breathtaking was it was two discs of heartfelt, continuously flowing energy that contrasted varying intensities of misery, fury, agony and fear to absolute perfection, layered in ways to channel the feeling of drowning in one’s own self-pity/self-loathing while tucked up and shaking in a corner surrounded in flickering shadow (MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!). This here appears to be a case of running through the motions by tacking bits and pieces together.

So now we get to the quality of the music, which is generally more hit than miss. There aren’t many riffs that I can sink my teeth into unlike this album’s predecessor (some of them coming across as pedantic variations of the “Jaws” theme), and while I’ve known Esoteric to use atmosphere far more to drive the message home than bands like Evoken or Ahab, it feels like there’s few true pay-offs to the build-ups of tension throughout the more reflective, intense and demanding sections of the album.

Even the clean sections which should be easier to integrate into this style of music than tremolo riffs in primitive black metal (or for those of you missing the dick jokes, my dick in…) appear disjointed from the rest, an easy means to shift the mindset, nowhere near as completely essential in tying the voyage together as with the last record. When I hear doom bands lifting from Immortal’s “At the Heart of Winter” or The Doors, I’m not exactly transported to an otherworldly pit of depravity, but otherwise the band still displays a proficiency in lifting you up and dragging you down; overall it isn’t so much the music or even the mood that lets “Paragon…” down, it’s how it all appears quite disconnected from the greater purpose strived for – this certainly is an entertaining release, but not the key to the soul, the liberation from life’s torment that I was expecting, an album that makes me think “Holy shit, why haven’t I killed myself already?”.

The pained, stretched bellows of Chandler are as contorted as ever, a mixture of real low gutturals and screeching highs that go hand in hand very comfortably with tracks entitled “Loss of Will” and “Non Being”, but of course. Drums on this record are unsurprisingly left simple with occasional bursts of energy, which leaves the thick, pendulum guitars otherwise broken up by leads that bring little but some variation to some plodding, generally underwhelming riffs.

Esoteric’s lead playing used to be a mood-setter (take “The Blood of the Eyes”, for example), even with the balls-out shred (as with track “Order of Destiny”), all the sweet-notes strengthened what was going on in the background no matter how fast the notes in between being played; on “Paragon…”, it’s often a jarring shred-fest with little feel, a hackneyed standard of improvisation. For example the 3:30 minute mark lead off “Abandonment” that spans roughly two minutes of the track, the idea seems so juvenile in comparison to the experience flaunted on “The Maniacal Vale”. Shredding to break the monotony of dull riffing doesn’t make Esoteric the masterful visionaries I’ve known them for.

So, for a band or sub-genre I was never too much invested in, “Paragon of Dissonance” has surprisingly come as a disappointment for me. I would recommend absolutely everything this band has released prior, but this is quite weak sauce in comparison, no real feel for the dynamics and continuity that made past records absolute standout atmospheric gems in a style of music renowned for such. On a track by track basis, we have a good album that is strangely accessible, with plenty of variation and moods – I’m thinking though they may as well have kept it down to a one-disc release and trimmed the fat, the conceptual feel of past efforts being half the battle in winning me over like the smitten “Crimson I & II”-whore that I am.

6,5

Information
Released: 2011
Label: Season of Mist
Website: Esoteric MySpace
Band
Greg Chandler: vocals, guitars, keyboards
Jim Nolan: guitars, keyboards
Mark Bodossian: bass
Joe Fletcher: drums

Tracklist
Disc 1
01. Abandonment
02. Loss of Will
03. Cipher
04. Non Being
Disc 2
01. Aberration
02. Disconsolate
03. A Torrent of Ills

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