From: No Clean Singing
Published: February 13, 2017
*This is a brief review that accompanied the digital / cassette band self-release.
I have starkweather to thank (as I have in the past) for bringing this next release to my attention. It’s the debut album of the one-man London-based black metal band Kassad. Entitled Faces Turn Away, it was released on February 5 (digitally and on tape).
This album isn’t my first exposure to Kassad. Almost exactly one year ago I enthusiastically reviewed Kassad’s debut EP Humans in another one of these Shades of Black posts (and I still urge you to check that out if you haven’t already). This new album is a stunner, too.
The music isn’t too beholden to tradition, but doesn’t completely forget it either. It’s boiling hot, scalding enough to bleed your ears, but just as often it’s as desolate and drifting as cigarette smoke in a lonely desert bar out in the middle of nowhere, with brilliant stars and moonlight overhead, mocking the wasted lives below. It strikes that perilous balance with a sure hand, the fire and the smoldering embers connected at a deep and organic level.
The music’s powerful allure is rooted in the melodies, which hit the target even when the songs (and the vocals) are at the zenith of their fire-storming intensity. But the most emotionally devastating moments come in the half-life, half-death of songs like “Void”, where the vocals undergo a striking metamorphosis, and “Broken”, in which searing lead guitar vibrations spear the heart dead-center.
But really, every song connects at a primal level, plumbing the depths of human affliction and resilience. Dramatic variations from song to song add to the overall strength of the album as a transportive experience, all the way down to the mystical ambient drift of the closing track, “Pulse”.
To repeat, this is a stunner.
