Ever listened to an Ornette Coleman LP and thought, “yeah, it’s okay I guess, but it could really do with some blastbeats”? If so, avant-metal weirdos Abhorrent Expanse might just have a dollop of the secret sauce you’ve been craving.
Like the band’s 2022 debut, Enter The Misathropocene was improvised live in the studio. This means that despite having songs titled ‘Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment’ and ‘Nephilim Disinterred’ there’s a distinct lack of rollicking riffs, and the band’s approach to heavy metal is more likely to leave you scratching your head than feeling compelled to whip strands of your sweaty barnet into someone else’s pint.
Things begin with a vast fetching of the guts: a chaotic, borderline vulgar blurt that suggests Aussie death metal weirdos Portal playing a stint at Cafe OTO. It’s fragmentary and barbaric but also the album’s most clear-cut ‘metal’ moment, with things only becoming more scattered and diffuse as they explode outward.
The aptly-named ‘Praise For Chaos’, for example, spends most of its run time exploring lurking, spacious drones before violently scrabbling toward the finish line with a jarring guitar workout straight out of the Mick Barr playbook. ‘Kairos’, meanwhile, sounds like a small crystal clock being kicked down the stairs, ‘Waves Of Graves’ recalls balloon animals being made in hell and ‘Dissonant Agressors’ features some pebbledashed scat (as in Scatman John, not animal shit). Elsewhere, ‘Ascension Symptom Acceleration’ takes the time to lay on some rather tasteful clarinet.
It’s bewildering, panic-inducing and frequently exhausting, but Enter The Misanthropocene is also compelling despite the discomfiture it induces. There’s a certain audacity here that should really be applauded, the band opting for interesting, esoteric pursuits over easy sonic wins. After all, when was the last time you heard glass harmonica, waterphone and bowed metals deployed alongside tangled death metal riffing and Repulsion-level velocities?
Trying to figure out how things connect ultimately feels foolish and masochistic, like tracing a soft fingertip over the cracks that spiderweb their way across a huge broken mirror. Instead, it’s better just to accept that Abhorrent Expanse exist in a realm that is beyond rational computation: a place where time folds in on itself, possibilities are endlessly refracted and the likes of Painkiller, Blind Idiot God and Imperial Triumphant weep blood while playing endless residencies for the hooting, hollering, pig-faced hoards of hell.
