CVLT Nation is proud to bring you a true headfuck today. Featuring members of Canadian extreme metal terrorists like dark grind destroyers WAKE and avant-grind anomalies Seminrary – Mind Mold have a created an authentic enigma of a debut with their self titled EP. Inside this tape you will find some of the most discordant, dissonant, oblique, off-kilter, and cerebral blackened doom metal you will hear all year. Imagine if Deathspell Omega, Ulcerate, or Gorguts played slow atmospheric doom, and that’s more or less where you’d end up with Mind Mold… In a place were synapses burst and brains collapse under the sheer force of a dissonant and vacuuming void from which nothing can escape. The slow-moving, cerebral, and vast music, however, allows for the band to create some astonishingly surreal atmospheres and truly captivating moments, as if the warped and dialled pace of the record somehow let some absurd beauty shine through the intricate and chaotic fractals of the work.
Mind Mold do not ignore nor forget the urgency and raw emotion that comes from punk and hardcore, and do a great job at keeping things moving at a considerable pace with raw urgency, never getting wound up in drawn out moments, and focusing instead on crafting average length songs which never lose momentum and constantly stride forward, holding the listener pinned against a wall with a cascading onslaught of bent riffs, skull-cruching rhythms, blood-freezing atmospheres, and heart-ripping vocals. This balanced and very well-thought out blend of abstract and absurd riffs, amazing atmospheres and raw emotion have allowed Mind Mold to craft something truly special and unique that sounds like a surreal collision between Paracletus era Deathspell Omega and Red Sea era Isis. In all fairness, this is stuff so unique and drenched in personality that the influences pulled by the band in to envision such a chaotic and oblique work could potentially be endless (the band have explicitly mentioned Les Automatistes, Burning Witch, Goatsblood, Thomas Pyncheon, and Deadguy as influences), and if you dig and dissect deeper, and try to see beyond the tightly woven knits of chaotic dissonance the work is built upon, you’ll discover a wide array of allusions, echoes, and subtle references to the most sparse musical influences, from Rorschach to Blut Aus Nord, and from Jesu/Godflesh to Today Is The Day and Zeni Geva and beyond.
The Mind Mold EP drops as tape+digital through Sentient Ruin on April 28 and can be grabbed on their store or on their Bandcamp, and make sure you check out this amazing trailer for the release done by Chariot of the Black Moth:
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