Album Review: Erdve – Epigrama
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
How miserable do you want your chugs? Because just in case your answer was “very”, Lithuania have seen fit to export abject desolation for your waiting ears. The order of business here is a withering combination of sludgy breakdown onanism meeting shrill, unnerving ambience hovering overhead, like vultures circling the gladiator pit. There’s an enfolding, ethereal feel to it – those simple but piercing melody lines smothering you while syncopated chugs take hammers to your limbs. Diaphanous veils of drifting refrains that inject this forlorn character into each track on top of the constant thuggish beatdowns. This approach is more often than not formidable. “Skleistis” feels like being trapped in a collapsing steelworks, the sickening plunge of downtuned open strings like tumbling girders while lachrymose plucked notes echo out over crumbled walls.
Vocalist Vaidotas Darulis has a particularly agonised bellow that felt almost like schadenfreude to enjoy. He howls like a man with problems, this jagged hardcore roar dripping with pathos. It’s a loud, forceful album that washes over and through you. Waves, waves, waves. A horde of tidal swells. There’s something meditative about water. It applies here too; distortion borne on cliff-edge tsunamis, pale stallions cresting Poseidon’s raking fingers. The album feels like a deluge; almost ambient in texture. The sheer heaviness of it blurs into static, somewhere below the earth flows, liquid clasp about an iron core, it’s a body of matter, a thing built of enshrouding distortion, “Skepsis” at 4.02 bears down with a combination of impossibly downtuned riffs boring mantle elements out black miles down below and the high-pitched screech of the flayer’s work up above. The grooves are brutal; “Svertas” is less a song than five and a half minutes of uppercuts to the guts, one groaning bottom-string riff after another, each thudding home with the implacable thump of an underslung grenade launcher. But that compliment is one that could more or less apply to every song on here – and therein lies the rub.
As effective as it is, there does come a time where the album feels to have rather made it’s point, and attempts to spice things up – a rattling hip hop beat on “Trukmè” for example – are interesting but don’t necessarily gel well with the downbeat punishment elsewhere. I think that if the band had sporadic moments where they really accelerated it could do a lot to contrast the groove that they prioritise, taking the album from one that flattens you to one that could straight smash you through the floor. The band have done this before to great effect – “lavondemes” on their “Savigaila” album opens by angle grinding your face to the bone with weaponized blastbeats and sickly, jarring chords. Something similar would have gone leagues towards salving the somewhat one-note impression the album leaves you with. I find that I enjoy each song in isolation but altogether in a tracklist, it’s undeniably a bit on the repetitive side.
Do you like Heriot? Or The Acacia Strain? How about Nemertines or Humanity’s Last Breath? If your answer to any or all of the above is “yes” then you owe Erdve your attention. It’s a churning caldera of unsavoury downtempo grunt, and even if I would welcome a touch more variation the pure heaviness of it on a case-by-case basis cannot be gainsaid.
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