Xasthur - To Violate The Oblivious Review

Rating: 4.5

Country: USA

Release Date: 2004

Track list:
1. Intro
2. Xastur Within
3. Dreams Blacker than Death
4. Screaming at Forgotten Fears
5. Consumed by a Dark Paranoia
6. Marked by Shadows
7. Apparitional Void of Failure
8. A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors
9. Walker of Dissonant Worlds

Band Website: Xasthur

Xasthur - To Violate The Oblivious

Malefic (Scott Conner): all instruments and vocals

I'll open this review with a sentence that is about as clichéd as the material on this disc: ‘Oh, how the mighty have fallen'. This album could have easily been called ‘Been there, done that'. There's preciously little here that hasn't been done before in a better way on Nocturnal Poisoning, Funeral of Being or any of Xasthur's split cds.

You'll hear the same melancholy Burzum-inspired base with Mütiilation-inspired overlayed acoustic and bass guitars and Manes-inspired backing keyboards. There is one slight change though, in that there are some Katatonia-inspired lead-parts spiralling around some of the bass-progressions from time to time, but again nothing we haven't heard before. The only other difference is that the idiosyncrasies of his earliest releases that managed to still make his songs sound slightly original are practically absent here. The production is cleaned up significantly over his old albums and leaves nothing to the imagination. And then there's the drum machine which uses the exact same drum-patterns as every other Xasthur song. If you're familiar with Xasthur, you're guaranteed to know exactly what type of fills will show up between riff-segments. This is extra noticeable due to the fact that the drums are given more attention in the mix, another grave mistake. The vocals are more upfront and forcefully vicious and are one of the few improvements over previous works. Still they really can't save this album from abject mediocrity.

For while the riffs and embellishments are basically recycled from his back-catalogue, this isn't the album's great damning flaw. There have been other bands which recycled riffs while still coming up with somewhat interesting songs. No, where this album goes completely down the drain is in its overly formulaic and utterly predictable song structures. Seriously, the very first time I listened to this I could accurately predict how the songs would progress. Opening melancholic riff repeats between four to eight phrases with a mid-tempo drum pattern, then slows down a bit while adding some bass and keyboards for a spell to denote some kind of agony, then a new riff emerges over a sped-up drumbeat to show despair mixed with some kind of determination, followed by a slower bridge or a drumless echoing burzum-riff invoking final tragedy, return to the opening riff and so on ad nauseum for basically every song.

This is for all intents and purposes a thoroughly washed down, bland, simplistic and predictable rendition of Nocturnal Poisoning. And since that album was somewhat of a tribute to Burzum and Mütiilation, that makes this a retread of a retread. A pale copy of a shadow of greater bands. It competely disgusts me to see how a once respectable artist sacrifices his artistic integrity for this mass-produced, imaginationless, mediocre trash. I'll definitely pass on this musician from now on and I suggest the reader to only bother with A Gate through Bloodstained Mirrors, Nocturnal Poisoning, Suicide in Dark Serenity and maybe, if you really like these, The Funeral of Being. Forget everything else and especially this release.

Pathetic.

August 3rd, 2007