Emptiness-Error

While hordes of bands worship and get influenced from very obvious acts which took that genre forward during its glory days, it is not very clear to state what Emptiness was influenced by. If we continue to get fooled by the plain genre statements on the Metal Archives, the we are sure to have a lot more surprises than this. Emptiness had the clear black/death tag on, so you would think that this was another war metal band coming with all sorts of satanic nonsense. Well, it seems I've been tricked once again because Emptiness come with a completely different style that I had expected. Glooming riffs and an unlit atmosphere altered by unending waves of deppression, doomy passages, dark aspects have high eminence on this record, showing that it's not for the weaker ones.

I scarcely see a band with such prominence over the dark and deppressive aesthetics of metal, and the closest thing to make a comparison is Hellvetron's recent album which builds on a similar dark, glooming atmosphere. However this comparison is far from the best as Hellvetron focuses on satanic, blasphemous sounds to give the listener a blood-curdling nightmare while Emptiness' main fix is the exploration of the human mind and most importantly, emotions, to twist and harvest their sorrow into an edless seeming nightmare that engulfes the listener throughout a dense, chaotic ambience-a wicked way of torture. I was first very frusturated while listening to this album, it takes my breath away due to its inundating density but at the same time, this is music. It can be exceedingly entertaining if you prefer the darker, more brooding and venemous face of black metal along with a good concentration on death metal. For some the atmosphere may be too much to take in, but for metalheads who are used to listening similar bands and albums which experiment through darker and more deppressive sounds. Brooding melodies descend and hit over and over again, while heavy guitar tones swagger around, showing off their supreme display of this swamping aesthetic.

Ok, I think anyone would have understood the basic facts about the album by now, but there is also a different side of ''Error''. While the first couple of songs spread like a contagion of gloominess through the listeners ears, there is a large number of tracks which actually play in the same, crushing yet chaotic way that I thought they would. The guitars wield an immense heaviness with distorted chords flying around as common as birds and the dynamic incursions of the razor-sharp metal metal riffs are both epic and stressing. As the album escalates, the riffs emerge from the terribly tenebrous feel that they once gave and slowly transform into more crushing pieces, a well-mixed hybrid of death and black metal. The vocals are quite echoing, alternating rapidly between darkened low gutturals and higher register shreiks is a very short amount of time. The music returns to its volatile and ominious state shortly after the seventh song, showing that light of positivity is limited and that depression is still the main aspect of the album. Murderous, epic and venemous, ''Error'' shows the most compulsive elements of black/death and thus, engrosses the listener like multiple doses of lethal injection being injected.

There are two main reasons of why someone should get this album: If one enjoys the hearing doomy dirges and tenebrously epic moments fluctuatingly and if one wanst to try a less pervasive sound, one that is more experimental than a strightforward influence. Emptiness have truely showed their talent in frustrating the listener and filling them with stress and desparation, in a most tormenting way. There is black metal, of the most oppressive king and there is death metal, to add a crushing feel to stop it from compketely boring the listener out. I'd say, everything is perfectly balanced, the guitars, the riffs, the timing and most importantly the overall ambience, perfected. Once again, I shall repeat that this album is not for everyone, but it is a rich feast for the ones who enjoy this side of metal.

Highlights:
It and I
Dissolution
Low

Rating: 85%