When it comes to blackened noise, few bands have the power to truly unsettle you at an extremely deep level and creep you the fuck out for good. Sure, the genre is dark and claustrophobic, but we’re almost in 2014 now and it’s definitely not anything we haven’t heard before. That is true until you run into a new Sutekh Hexen album. To this day, no matter how prolific and active, this demonic quartet from Oakland still manages with every single release to scare the shit out of you once again, and inject into your ear ducts music that literally gnaws on your synapses like a horde of demonic rats, tunneling through your sorry skull to feed on your brain. As such it comes as absolutely no surprise that their new EP Monument of Decay is yet another caustic, excruciating and frightening mauling of dark ambient, harsh noise and black metal, vile and evil enough to plunge you into complete unsettlement and turn your skies black in a matter of seconds.
I listened to Monument of Decay over and over again for a few days, with headphones only and in different settings each time, to try and grasp the essence of it, and I failed at every listen. Each time I sat back down with it to “understand” it or try to pin it into a conceptual corner that my brain could elaborate and absorb, this vile and disgusting album morphed once again, revealing details and nuances that I hadn’t previously picked up, and throwing my sorry brain back into an orb of unsettlement and confusion impossible to solve. This is music that is deeply layered and abstract, and almost feels like a mutant creature of sorts that forces you to always look at it from a different angle and perspective. At times it’s violent and confrontational nature reminds me of Mories and his slime-drenched work under the De Magia Veterum moniker, and of course Gnaw Their Tongues comes to mind too, but Sutekh Hexen manage to convey the same sonic concepts in a way less obvious way and in a far more ambiguous, elaborate and artistic way. This music literally sounds like Gnaw Their Tongues for PHDs, because it feels more refined and highly engineered, like you have to sit down with it to dissect it and understand it rather than just passively take in its obvious overload of violence, like in the Mories case.
Nevertheless, there is so much more in this music than just it’s balls-out violence, and at times it feels overbearing and overloaded with madness and with an extremely evil depth. You can trace back some sounds to the Guapo and Ulver as shit just gets really subtle and eerie. Then shit morphs again and starts to mutate under the punishing disfigurement of blasts of Japanoise, corrosive power electronics, Finnish-style harsh noise and total post-industrial destruction. In complete amazement, like in the case of Dhumavati’s Hunger you will be amazed to find that the band, although in its own disgusting way, is rocking on something that sounds like a black metal beat, but is way out there like early Darkthrone and Merzbow having some kind of disgusting orgy of sorts. I cannot stress enough how unsettling but refined, intelligent, elaborate and just fucking vile the music of Sutekh Hexen is, and Monument of Decay is another one of their finest hours in this band’s still short but already fucking immense career. Face your demons and grab a copy of this beautifully hideous LP right now, straight from Black Horizons, or grab the tape from Beläten.
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