In the case of Unaussprechlichen Kulten and their fourth album, Keziah Lilith Medea (Chapter X), you needn’t be able to say something aloud in order to give yourself over to it. In fact, sometimes it may be that a band name is unspeakable for a reason. For here is practised true esoteric ways. Here is a place where wanderers may never return—at least not unchanged. Nor is the blackened death metal conjured and harnessed by these inveterate warlocks any more forthcoming.
On their fourth full length in their nearly twenty year existence, Unaussprechlichen Kulten find harmony in grace and viciousness. Their songwriting is, as ever, sophisticated, indicative of these Chileans’ time-honed talents, but the songs themselves are ancient spells bringing ungodly brutality. And “Sacrificio Infanticida” is an all-encompassing, feverish glimpse at what the rest of Keziah Lilith Medea (Chapter X) has in store for you. These Chileans write their riffs to some otherworldly metronome. With leads like fanged worms that bore into your ear through your skull, and deep into your brain; filling your mind with hallucinogenic visions of elder planes where horror dwells and chaos reigns. It’s clear that Unaussprechlichen Kulten spent the three years since their last full length deep in some arcane practices.
Says Joseph Curwen, the band’s guitarist and vocalist: “This new album, within the ‘strict’ margins that allows us death metal, I think are two different things regarding our previous work: The Sound of this new album is much dirtier, the guitars are very much ‘crisp’ (in the European way), but still retain the typical weight of the American death metal guitars. The second difference is the composition, this album is more somber, more dense, more ‘thick,’ and needs more time on the part of the listener to assimilate some passages.”
Curwen continues: “The name of each song [comes from] our Lovecraftian stare of some of the previous formulas in the start to become Witches, described in the Compendium Maleficarum, and are consistent with the four formulas described in the Malleus Maleficarum.”
Curwen goes on to explain that “Sacrificio Infanticida” “is based on some Lovecraft tales. We can [find] numerous cases of child sacrifice rituals. It is common to see that in the Walpurguis Eve, or in the Day of the Dead, the children disappear. In ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ these rituals are routinely held in Walpurgisnacht in the Devil’s Reef. In ‘Rats in the Walls’ . . . Trevor Lady Margaret Cornish [is described] as ‘the terror of children.’ Even the followers of Lovecraft used this subject, as the case of Robert E. Howard’s ‘The Black Stone’ that describes a ritual of a degenerate primitive tribe of humans that sacrifice a child [by] crashing [it] against a monolith stone. Of course Keziah Mason (Nahab) is the Lovecraft child killer witch par excellence: An attic full of rotting bones of children for years attest the witch ceremonies.”
Get Keziah Lilith Medea (Chapter X) June 2nd from Iron Bonehead.
