Album review written for Inferno Requiem's 2016 EP "Moon." Posted on Metal Archives, the target audience for this review was metal music enthusiasts and potential consumers. Metal Archives is an online metal music resource that is considered by many to be The Holy Grail of all metal music-related information
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From Philosophy to the Arts, one of the most discussed and represented concepts is the physical and psychological torment of being human. The human condition, and what it implies, is a paramount question that we all are trying to understand, either through calculated inner reflection or through rituals to any and all deities. Within the broad field of music, metal music is notably a medium used exhaustively for inquiring about the human condition and the rituals we use to cope with being human. Taiwan’s black metal outfit Inferno Requiem on 2016’s Moon is no different and, in a rather characteristically pessimistic manner, conveys their perspective on mortality with an atmosphere of high sonic, raw doom.
From the beginning until the end, Fog, the tortured soul behind Inferno Requiem, articulates an aural ritual of misanthropy through the use of jackhammer percussion, esoteric distortion and his own high-pitched bellows that resemble howls of agony. The psychological and physical uneasiness that blooms, because of the sonic anxiety of the instrumentals, builds throughout the EP and eventually engulfs you in a clusterfuck of dread and manic depression. Lyrically, Moon also articulates feelings of deep-seated anxiety and overwhelming melancholy. Screamed in formal and ancient Chinese, notions of primitive cosmic chaos with elusive distinctions between entities (“Vein”) to the blood rituals of a mysterious gathering (“Coven”) are poetically and vividly shrieked; while graphic stories about how the old transmogrifies into the new (“Monolith”) and the unraveling of everything—even morality— (“Moon”) are arrhythmic-ly vomited.
All in all, Moon does a decent job of taking you on a solemn journey through the chaos of mortality and the rituals we use to cope with the banes of being human. My only complaint is the lack of smooth transitions between songs and at the beginning and end of the entire EP. The abrupt start-stopping at the beginning and end of Moon (the EP) definitely jolts you out of the gloominess that the music conjures. As such, Moon has the potential of stimulating an amazing, out-of-body experience, especially in a live setting, but falls short in the recorded format; the recorded version of Moon doesn’t really do it justice and, in fact, seems to dampen the power the music should possess.
Listening to Inferno Requiem’s Moon is surely a transcendental, emotional hell-ride into the bleak and, with its feverish static quality, makes you feel highly nihilistic after a few listens; it’s an album that helps bring out the misanthropist in all of us.