{"id":25038,"date":"2020-11-21T13:15:26","date_gmt":"2020-11-21T18:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=25038"},"modified":"2020-11-21T13:15:26","modified_gmt":"2020-11-21T18:15:26","slug":"album-review-immortality-through-quantum-suicide-xythlia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2020\/11\/21\/album-review-immortality-through-quantum-suicide-xythlia\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Immortality Through Quantum Suicide, Xythlia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Album Name: Immortality Through Quantum Suicide<\/span><\/p>\n

By: James Rivers<\/span><\/p>\n

Release Date: July 17, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n

Genre: Cybergrind\/Noise<\/span><\/p>\n

Related Artists: Ashbringer, Code Orange, See You Next Tuesday<\/span><\/p>\n

Rating: 9\/10<\/span><\/p>\n

The atmospheric black metal band, Ashbringer, has garnered some buzz in the underground.\u00a0 It features some top-quality songwriting and musicianship.\u00a0 So, when frontman Nick Stanger announced a solo project, most people probably weren\u2019t expecting what Xythlia delivered.\u00a0 Xythlia features Nick Stanger writing all the songs and doing all the instruments.\u00a0 The one exception is the drums since it\u2019s a drum machine.\u00a0 This first album, Immortality Through Quantum Suicide, is chaotic, bizarre, and one of the most WTF releases this year.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The album opens with the song, \u201cDeath Unyielding.\u201d\u00a0 This track wastes no time getting into some crazy noise.\u00a0 Right out of the gate, it is unrelenting, unsettling, and challenging to listen to.\u00a0 Even mathcore fans might have difficulty understanding what the hell is going on.\u00a0 The chaos lets up for a moment with a really cool, more straightforward heavy riff and a genius string bending chorus melody.\u00a0 It all moves so fast that before you know it, it\u2019s back to the chaotic sounds.\u00a0 The following track, \u201cTo Defy Inevitability,\u201d has a bit more to it than just frantic aggression.\u00a0 It does start with similar bizarre intensity.\u00a0 But it adds some more elements to it, showing some more depth to the material.\u00a0 There\u2019s one section where it gets kind of thrashy, before returning to the discordant, technical rage.\u00a0 But the track reveals another hand.\u00a0 It shows some of the Ashbringer black metal elements in a brief, dreamy clean.\u00a0 Everything moves so rapidly on the album that every moment to take a breath is less than fleeting.\u00a0 The chaotic sounds return to end the track with an ugly whine of the guitars.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The one break on the album comes with the track, \u201cAntidream.\u201d\u00a0 At only 45 seconds long, it is the one track without any of the frenetic energy that dominates the album.\u00a0 The track features soft, clean guitars in a short, somber melody.\u00a0 It serves as a much-needed breather and displays that the album is all about intention.\u00a0 This chaotic sound is done on purpose.\u00a0 If Stanger wanted to, he could have released a pretty sounding release more in line with this track.\u00a0 But this is the first moment on the album where it\u2019s made abundantly clear that the seemingly disorganized music is purposely organized to sound disorganized.\u00a0 Antidream leads into the track, \u201cAblation of Subconscious.\u201d\u00a0 The opening riff sounds very much Mayhem inspired.\u00a0 It\u2019s drawn out, sinister, and dramatic.\u00a0 This track is dizzying, yet it has more of a breather than any of the previous tracks.\u00a0 The dramatic cymbal hits give the listener another brief moment before the ear assault resumes.\u00a0 There\u2019s a really cool section here with a quick clean riff on top of these crazy blast beats.\u00a0 It\u2019s an interesting juxtaposition and a notable moment from the track.\u00a0 This song features more of the crazy sounds lathered all over the album.\u00a0 Towards the end there\u2019s a crazy sounding riff that almost sounds like a bunch of tech\/computer noises as it moves up the scale.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The song, \u201cFlesh Prison,\u201d starts out with some chaotic shredding.\u00a0 But this song has more of a hardcore vibe to it.\u00a0 It sounds like Code Orange on crack.\u00a0 The song has some really cool parts, such as a brief part where the guitar kind of sounds out of tune.\u00a0 This song features some crazy guitar shredding and some impossible double bass.\u00a0 It\u2019s the crazy that is expected at this point on the album.\u00a0 But it still manages to sound different, even if it is altering the bizarre sound in minor ways.\u00a0 Tracks like, \u201cPost-Ironic Indoctrination,\u201d really pack a punch.\u00a0 It is a short instrumental track that starts out with some echo guitar reverb of some sort.\u00a0 The song then launches into the intense cacophony of sounds that shows that not even short instrumentals are safe from the audible onslaught of this album.\u00a0 This track perfectly displays the chaos that characterizes this album and can only be simply described as \u201csome crazy-ass-shit.\u201d\u00a0 The album soon moves into the song, \u201cThe Eye Bath.\u201d\u00a0 It begins with crazy, syncopated noise sounds coming from guitar effects.\u00a0 This track features a lot of scale shredding and doesn\u2019t let up on the energy.\u00a0 There are some of the black metal elements from earlier that resurface very briefly.\u00a0 What makes this song one of my favorites is the main riff.\u00a0 It\u2019s basically just some pitchshifter\/guitar effects that goes up the scale and then down the scale.\u00a0 It sounds like something out of an old cartoon.\u00a0 It\u2019s hilarious and awesome all at the same time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The final track, \u201cFester in the Nether,\u201d breaks expectations.\u00a0 At 4:45, this track is the longest on the album and should be a hint that it is something different.\u00a0 This entire album\u2019s unrelenting fury ends with a track that starts off with some nice cleans in a more comprehensible groove.\u00a0 It dials up a bit more after that, but still remains relatively normal, which by this point is weird.\u00a0 It gradually becomes a bit more discordant as the song goes on.\u00a0 In a sense, this song melds some of the black metal clean elements with the chaos in a more digestible way.\u00a0 As the song ends, it seems to callback to some of the earlier songs on the album.\u00a0 The crazy up\/down riff from The Eye Bath makes a reappearance.\u00a0 It ties everything together and seems to show that there was some order to all this madness.\u00a0 The song ends as it goes into full chaos mode.\u00a0 This album ending is as abrupt as its beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to really describe the sound of this album other than adjectives, such as bizarre, chaos, noise, disorder, crazy, and weird.\u00a0 It is impressive to think that someone sat down and put all this together.\u00a0 Even among all the noisy chaos, nothing seems out of sync.\u00a0 The drums and guitars seem to be working together to produce this ridiculous sound.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t sound like anything was recorded out of time or out of place.\u00a0 It just sounds dense and ferocious.\u00a0 It does leave a bit more to be desired though.\u00a0 Perhaps a bit more musical maturity, like on Fester in the Nether, is where Xythlia\u2019s headed.\u00a0 Nevertheless, this is still a great album.\u00a0 If you\u2019re looking for something weird, challenging, or intense to listen to, look no further than Xythlia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Album Name: Immortality Through Quantum Suicide By: James Rivers Release Date: July 17, 2020 Genre: Cybergrind\/Noise Related Artists: Ashbringer, Code Orange, See You Next Tuesday Rating: 9\/10 The atmospheric black metal band, Ashbringer, has garnered some buzz in the underground.\u00a0 It features some top-quality songwriting and musicianship.\u00a0 So, when frontman Nick Stanger announced a solo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17442,"featured_media":25039,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1524,1523,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17442"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25040,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25038\/revisions\/25040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}