A Two Headed Aural Beast: ABATON & VISCERA/// – “Diade(ms)” 7″ Review + Stream

Earlier last year, a statement of real friendship and of harrowing aggression was sealed. Abaton and Viscera/// are two sludge/doom bands from Italy that have been laying venues to waste all over Europe and spreading the seeds of their internal torment all over their homeland and beyond for years now, endlessly touring and putting out records for at least the past five years. Aside from that, their paths have crossed many times over the past years and a strong friendship cemented itself from their continued encounters touring across their homeland. From this friendship has stemmed Diade(ms), not a split, but a fully collaborative EP by the two bands, in which ALL the members of both bands have played on BOTH the songs contained within at the same time.

Diade(ms) kicks off with “Special Needs” a thundering slab of psychedelic blackened sludge that hits the listener straight out the gate like a mammoth cannonball breaking through a concrete wall and sinking like a fist into the listener’s stomach. The track chokes and crushes you, vacuuming all air from your lungs in a colossal implosion of heaviness in which you can hear distant echoes of Year of No Light, Amenra, Godflesh, and Unearthly Trance in their more aggressive moments. Accompanied by harrowing and tortured vocals, dissonant and crushing guitars and an absolutely bulldozing rhythm section, this movement represent the most direct and uncompromising moment of the split, and a mere five and half minutes of absolutely bone-crunching destruction.

Side B tones down the aggression but not the heaviness or sense of permanent suffocation. “Pandemic” kicks off with an eerie but ominous intermittent guitar melody slowly building and swelling like a tidal wave, and summoned by the most disgusting vocals ever, as if some kind of liturgy or ceremony is being carried out to evoke the bleakest omens possible. Slowly but surely, the song slithers to a frightening climax toward the five minute mark, at which point everything is engulfed by a swirling storm of ruinous blackened shoegaze riffs that bring to mind Jesu and Altar of Plagues as if they are being swept away by a scorching wind of ash and embers.

Diade(ms) was released on June 23 as a 7” EP by Sentient Ruin in the US and and co-released in Europe by Hypershape Records (IT), Insomnia Isterica (CH), Bare Teeth Records (ITA), Drown Within Records (ITA), Unquiet Records (PL) and Dio Drone (ITA).