Dark Sky Burial
The Sacred Neurotic
Consouling Sounds
The beast within Napalm Death’s Shane Embury is stirring. In league with Carl Stokes from The Groundhogs, and Current 93, the grindcore legend goes electronic, at least for the most part, with their experimental Dark Sky Burial collaboration, whose mind-blowing new album, The Sacred Neurotic, explores the evil that exists in men’s hearts, including Embury’s. The better angels of our nature are not ignored, however.
Fascinated by Jungian light and dark archetypes, Embury continues traveling down a road of self-discovery, still processing grief and studying the universal duality from religious and literary standpoints. Five years in the making, The Sacred Neurotic is, by turns, cavernous and chaotic, hoary vocals howling with Old Testament gravitas and futuristic rage from great depths, enveloped by Swans-like brutality and cosmic expanse.
In “Thanatos Smiles,” a bellowing choir of mad, monk-like chants rises from the sonorous abyss, gripped by Lovecraftian horror and cut by slashing noise, while the echoes of “Crocodile Snaps” sweep across hypnotic pounding, spacey atmospherics, and wah-wah flashes of exploding radiance. Tempest tossed, a racing “Possessed by The Animus” is swamped by disorienting tumbles of glitchy frenzy and industrial skitter, scratched and bloodied by Nine Inch Nails fury, but “Cernunnos” and “Light” drive on through a battering gauntlet of icy, crystalized sounds to reach calmer celestial seas.
Often harrowing and drowning in mystery, but occasionally a beehive of hyperactivity or spread out in immense cinematic sprawl, The Sacred Neurotic is a dramatic tour de force, interrupted by episodes of mystical wonder and stoic serenity. Consider “Smother,” its ghostly wheel of acoustic guitar turned slowly, as if its ancient exhaustion hangs so heavy it takes an army to move it. It talks of “turning to stone,” but there is plenty of life and creative energy left in Dark Sky Burial. Here be monsters.
