The Nihilistic Front - The Four Seasons In Misery

Chris - Vocals, Drums
Gaz - Guitar, Keyboards

Upon listening to Excarnated's excoriating death metal album Purging The Earth, I had ruminated over its slower segments, thinking about its tremendous potential were it to be builded upon and used lavishly without the fear of creating an adverse effect on the music; i.e. to use them in a purely doom setting. As it fortuitously turned out, I was not the only one who thought of it as a workable idea. Far away in Australia behind a protective boxing kangaroo, the birth of a doom band The Nihilistic Front took place involving the ubiquitous Excarnated vocalist Chris and a brilliant musician in the form of Gaz. With their extreme form of doom metal, the band succeeded a bit too brutally in destroying my conservative Indian expectations of their music.

The Four Seasons In Misery comprises two songs, each of them lasting a goregrind lifetime of about 20 minutes. They are so vast and roomy that if you were to lay them down, you could play cricket on them and smash sixes even without being obstructed by structures. While comparisons to their beloved doom country mates Disembowelment are inevitable considering their hulking approach and an inclination to erupt aggressively, that wouldn't suffice to describe The Nihilistic Front's music which is far more interesting than a one band nipple-sucking. To have a fuller idea of their musical lineage, think of the excruciating crawling of the fabled monster Thergothon, the unemotional strangulating doom of Winter, the suspenseful atmospheric droning of Funerary Dirge and the industrial ambience of Jesu.

“The Four Seasons in Misery” begins with spoken, near chanted words, atmospheric sounds, tormented wails…all silenced by the advent of the resounding vocals of the headmaster Chris. Those of you familiar with his work on Excarnated and Sanguineous will never doubt his vocal abilities even if your girlfriend's life savings depended on it. His vocals in any case were bowel-deep, but specially for The Nihilistic Front, he removes them from the unplumbed depths of his being and elongates them to match the ones generally heard on the funeral doom albums. They are intermittently punctuated with tortured screams resonating painfully in the background, reminiscent of the anguished soul from the mental asylum of Bethlehem. The music drags along like the carcass of an elephant, its sheer weight making its progress seem somewhat reluctant. Industrial and droning sounds make random appearances, adding to the eerie atmosphere of this music. Around the 12 min mark, the plodding music deceptively transmutes into a cataclysmic Disembowelment segment, causing rumbling earthquakes, stampedes and subsequently a thousand chicken deaths. Towards the closure of this gargantuan song, tenuous undertones of melancholy are palpable, thawing your face paralysed with shock and awe to make way for the emotions to express themselves.

The other song, “Deranged Visions of Insanity” leads into a pronounced droning akin to Funerary Dirge, sounding like the ponderous passing of a frightfully large spaceship. As the spaceship gets closer to your presumable floating position, sibilant sounds and tortured screams emanating from the alien source are heard at an increasingly higher audio frequency, your eye sockets widening with alarm as if getting invisibly fisted. The music then trudges along unimpeded, the heavy-footed production ensuring complete drowning of the surrounding sounds. Similar to the previous track, around the 11 min mark Disembowelment makes its dreaded appearance and immediately pins you down to the ground, each of its thud then hitting you right on the chest. After flattening you expeditiously to an icky slime, the Disembowelment influence doesn't loiter around and fades away, after which you are once again made aware like a recurring nightmare of the presence of the tormented screams and arbitrary sounds that are accompanied by industrial beats a la Godflesh.

I am still recuperating after bearing witness to the deafeningly heavy and awe-inspiring doom music of The Nihilistic Front. What instantly works for this band is their elevation from the muddles of death metal to the rarefied levels of extreme minimalist doom. Pulverising music, strong on atmospherics and with a restraint on sentimentality, makes The Four Seasons In Misery nothing short of a terrific album.

August 7th, 2007