I don’t believe in fate, but it feels like something larger and unknowable turned the gears of the universe to have Alluvion, the long-awaited collaboration between A.L.N. of Mizmor and M.S.W. of Hell come out now, and as one of the final clanging bells for Gilead Media, long at the forefront of independent, extreme metal. As a mirror to the suffocating cloud that currently seems to hover over the country – if not the entire world – the four tracks contained within luxuriate in a dense, murky haze of blackened sludge and doom. It’s an album not to be taken lightly, confronting you head on with a bludgeoning torment that feels appropriate for the anguish sitting in my head right now.
I don’t make that last point lightly. This is not typically the kind of music I turn to in most normal circumstances. Mizmor has been largely hit or miss for me; I came in with 2016’s Yodh and, like everyone else went crazy for 2019’s Cairn at first, but the wallowing despair wasn’t something I could dwell on or in for extended periods. Likewise M.S.W. in either his solo output or his work under the Hell moniker: I’ve always been able to see the inherent passion, devotion, and conceptual goals of the work but the crushing weight of depression always exhausted me (excepting the crushing attack of “Wanderingsoul” which is just incredible).
But circumstances are anything but normal now, and diving into Alluvion I find the pair’s intent of using the music as – in their words – a map to help navigate the listener through bouts of psychic distress to be both eerily accurate and wholly welcome to my ears. Comprised of two mammoth tracks with shorter, more ambient pieces in between, the album gently folds you into its embrace with “Begging To Be Lost,” its first few minutes a delicate dirge, clean guitars and a low, intoning bass setting the stage before the first shuddering blast of distortion hits your brain like a runaway truck. Over the track’s 16+ minutes you’re exposed to a bass sound so thick and gritty it feels like it can scrape the skin off your bones. Despite being a guitar guy, it’s M.S.W.’s bass and A.L.N.’s drum work that really shine through here, keeping time in a way that the guitars and more ambient sounds can reflect and pass through the squalls of noise and still maintain a semblance of coherence, something a lot of bands in this style forget to do.
It’s followed by the more ambient and reverb-drenched “Vision I” which benefits from a short time at under five minutes. There are albums where you can let this kind of sound languish and occasionally punctuate your thoughts in the background, but Alluvion beckons the listener in deeper, and the change in sound is enough to refocus me before getting into the penultimate track, the aggressive blast of “Pandemonium’s Throat.” Even at 11 minutes it’s clear why this was chosen as the leading single, as it’s the more…well, call it “accessible” of the tracks with its more metal attack coming in around the 6:45 mark. It’s a welcome reprieve from the funeral doom cadence the preceding minutes take with the song, although I would be remiss if I didn’t admit how deep and harrowing those opening minutes are. Particularly with the vocals: the combined voices add an exponential layer of dread that slowly and very intentionally devolve into the sound of souls creaming from the abyss.
By the time of “Vision II”‘s sublime sunn O))) worship Alluvion has taken me on a journey I didn’t know I needed to go on, especially in this way. A.L.N. and M.S.W. have through a combination of their long-standing partnership and combined life experiences created a sonic document that not only captures the troubled times we live in and the anguish it holds on our lives, but also acknowledges that we are not alone in how we feel.
It may seem at odds to say I hear a glimmer of hope in music that is so dark and pessimistic, but the fact that Mizmor and Hell took the time in Alluvion to tell us we’re not alone in that pain is a grand statement on its own.
— Chris
Alluvion will be available April 4 from Gilead Media. For more information on Mizmor check out their website, Patreon and Instagram pages. For more on Hell, read your Bible or check out their bandcamp page.
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