Sweden’s Ignominy create apocalyptically bleak music that crushes musical barriers with death wish abandon. Come Abuse incorporates everything from blistering hardcore and funereal doom metal dirge to hypnotic ambience, post metal, and power electronics, with the one uniting factor being that it all sounds dark as fuck.
Where doom metal plumbs the seeming depths of sonic possibility in its exploration of funereal emotion, Ignominy manage to aim even lower in both regards. Come Abuse is emotional on a grand scale, with crushingly bleak subject matter paired with an astonishingly grim sound. Drums distort and crackle and mix with harsh electronic abuse, guitars crash and fall and are treated to occasionally unrecognizable levels, and cavernous vocals echo and swim in the ruination. If doom metal is apocalyptic music, Come Abuse is the sound of the apocalypse itself.
The first track, ‘Vägledningen,’ takes its time setting the scene for the end of the world with an almost Swans-ish wash of dark ambience. Hypnotically clanging guitar/bass that is so heavily effected it’s hard to tell quite what it is repeats over a bed of buzzing, swirling tape hiss, lulling you into a poisonous slumber like the soothing toxicity of an opiate flooding your veins. Eventually the doom comes crashing down and it feels like a fucking nuclear bomb. Guttural cries soar through the radioactive rain of guitar and crushing drum blasts for an epic marathon of a track, like the slow hopeless crawl out of ground zero.
Subsequent tracks pick things up to an almost normal hardcore sound, only undercut with so much weird dissonance, distorted electronic beats and hypnotic repetition to make sure you will never quite feel comfortable with this music. These tracks are like the post-bomb nuclear mutations that haunt and hound you through the wreckage of the destroyed world: twisted, freakish creations with only the slightest trace of their former selves.
Ignominy pull this off again and again, giving you enough of a familiar reference point to get a stable foot-hold before tearing the other leg out from beneath you and beating you senseless with it. The whole of Come Abuse plays like some twisted lucid dream, a nightmarish psychonautic vision of the end – but whether Ignominy have actually conjured the destruction of the universe or just battered you to brain damage remains to be seen.
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