Artist: Daemogog
Album: Yawning Expanse Yearning
Label: Bent Window Records
Release Date: 14/10/2022
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
Canadian experimental brutal death metal act Daemogog present us with one of the most simultaneously crushing and innovative albums of 2022 with Yawning Expanse Yearning.
The style of the music is honestly hard to pin down because there is just so much going on. The album’s base is definitely brutal death metal but thrown on top of that base are elements of sludge, dissonant death metal, black metal, post-metal, slam and psych. It’s in insane mashup that somehow manages to work even though it probably shouldn’t. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t care about genre tags, then just know that its heavy as all hell and somehow both dissonant and groovy at the same time.
For me what really drives the album is the drum work, which is honestly top notch. There’s a repeating rhythm throughout the release that feels almost slamish and whenever that hits the ability to resist headbanging becomes physically impossible. I say that the drums drive the album but in all honesty the guitar and bass are just as powerful and probably more important on this release. The guitar work is incredibly technical but also completely knuckle dragging caveman style stuff at the same time. The bass is incredibly thick, like to an insane level and sits very high in the mix. It’s this bass that gives the album that underlying groove element hidden inside of the dissonance.
Lastly, we have the vocals on the album, which are deeply guttural but also cavernous and haunting. They have a commanding presence yet feel otherworldly at the same time. The sharper, shrieked vocals that accompany the leads throughout the album help to amplify things that much more.
All of this becomes that much more impressive when you realise that all instrumentation on the album is performed by one person Brendan Campbell. Not only does he handle all instrumental duties, but he also shares vocal duties with the project’s only other contributor Miles Chic. Brendan has made it very clear with this album that he is a one-man army and a force to be reckoned with.
The other thing that makes the album, so captivating is the atmospheric quality the music possesses. There’s a haunting, eerie kind of lost in the void of space feeling to the release that ties in with the album’s themes perfectly. These themes focus around sci-fi and horror, which the music manages to express expertly. Song titles such as Globular Forms Emanating wixt the Lips of Space and A Reverberant Groan Probing the Corners of the Cosmos just help to hammer that point home and make the album that much better than it already is.Overall, this is one hell of a release and has immediately won me over as a fan. I’ll be following Brendan’s career and future outputs very closely. If you’re a fan of bizarre, suffocating, dissonant extreme metal then this is the album for you. If you’re a fan of bass heavy, groove laden extreme metal this is also the album for you.
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