Slovakia's Ceremony of Silence is kinda hard to write about. Not because they're super bland or anything, because they're not, but because this style of squealing atmospheric black/death metal is just a scene that I never really got into. It leans much more heavily on the death metal side, owing a lot to bands like Ulcerate, Mitochondrion, and Portal, but there are heaps of spacey tremolo riffs in the background that give it an almost atmoblack atmosphere above the twisting dissonance underneath. It invokes a very harmonic dissonance, if you will.
"Invocation of the Silent Eye" kicks the album off with the best god damned riff on the album, which sounds like Gorguts took a crack at rewriting the classic opening of "Pierced from Within". Those first ten seconds or so of Outis got me extraordinarily hyped for the remainder of the record, but admittedly it never really hits that peak of psychedelic brutality again. That's not to say the rest of the album is bad or anything, but if that opening section hooked you like it hooked me, then you might be disappointed that the rest of the album takes a different approach generally. From spacey atmosphere with no riffs at all like "Upon the Shores of Death" or frantic cacophonous blasting like "Black Sea of Drought", the album never really nails that sort of hook again (apart from the intro to "Into the Obscure Light"). That's not really the end of the world though, because the rest of Outis is quite good, but opening on a fucking masterclass riff and then spending the rest of the time with dissonant weirdness is a bit of a disappointment.
Admittedly this is more of a me problem than anything else, because I can see a fan of all of the aforementioned influences loving this to death. The problem is that I've just never really cared for Ulcerate, Gorguts, and the like. Ceremony of Silence surpasses quite a few of their influences, and the black metal overtones in the melodies is really cool, don't get me wrong, but this neverending avalanche of squelching dissonance is difficult for me to really judge. They abuse this trick of either tremolo picking or chugging on one note while slowly bending the string, creating this microtonal mindfuck of brutality beneath drumming that shifts and turns so much and so rarely sticks to a beat for more than one second at a time that it's just disorienting. That's the appeal of Outis, and it absolutely works. I can't really define the difference between the bands that I love (Immolation, Mithras) and the bands that I'm generally lukewarm on (Mitochondrion, Gorguts) that do this, but Ceremony of Silence sits somewhere in the middle of those two camps. I think it's the spacey black metal melodies that keep this from sounding like something weird and unlistenable for the sake of it and instead make it sound like something wholly alien and not meant for human ears. I both love and don't really care about this, and the dissonance in my own opinion makes for a good representation of the conflicting nature of what they're doing. It's very adversarial, combative music and honestly, at its core, that's what metal is supposed to be.
RATING: 75%
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