Album: The Haunted House
Release: 2008 (Yeah, yeah I don't do 'fresh' reviews)
Genre: Depressive/Atmospheric Black Metal (and probably the grimiest yet)
Rating: 98% Dense and intense.
Welcome folks to an abhorrent, fifty-three minute nightmare. An agony of static and wretch fueled by a deep hatred of corruption and war. The atmosphere from start to finish both stimulating, and absolutely crushing. Devoid in its entirety of hope; stripping away emotion until you`re left with the barren tundras of loss and anathema. And this, from a Korean eighth-grader?
When the great tUMULt Laboratories first announced it was re-releasing this adolescent basement suffocation, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect (but I can assure you it was nothing positive). But the moment you open the jewel case and slide out the insert, you are struck with troubling images of a stark brutality; war. Sepia toned images of death and destruction. One image of a man hopelessly clutching the lifeless form of a friend; another of thousands fleeing from a fire-laden street. Terror, sorrow, rage, hatred, cruelty. From the first ninety seconds of the opening track "Appulyi", there was promise. Promise that, before the final few scarring seconds of the three part "Hyunnga is a Tangled Story" ticked away, was abruptly thrown into a chaotic pit of distortion and bare-bones, lo-fi odium. From the marrow-chilling vocal layers of the fifth track, "Song of the Elderly", to the eerily skeletal "Seomak" and "Message From Heaven", to easily the most driving 'black metal' track on the album, "After the Aliens", Pyha explores the foulest corners of struggle and emotional deprecation. Very nearly every second of this album is spent buzzing the red, pulsating continuously, breaking from the pained screams and doom-laden groans only for a few anguished keyboard interludes of the warmachine; for weeping mothers and terrified children.
How something so intense, so dissolute, could reside in the heart of a juvenile is well far and beyond me. Perhaps the most emotionally capturing, breathtaking, apalling album I have had the (dis)pleasure of listening to. It's albums like this that fuel my continued search to dive deeper into the obscure chasms of music. The vast fjord's of sound wherein lie the rarest of harmonious gems. Pyha, a bleakness, an utter darkness no obsidian, nor onyx, could match.
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