The territory crumbles.

The Teeth of Time | artist: Drouth — There is a wrenching tremolo pull that uproots an electric guitar chord at about the 5:10 mark of the track that opens this five song set by Drouth which sort of sums up the project. It is akin to a jaw being suddenly wrought open against its wishes. And to the best of my ears' understanding, this in fact is music as a form of extraction. "Beneath the folds of the map, the territory crumbles" they sing in the second track — "False Grail". And the question lingers — whatever was that territory to begin with and is it possible to extract chaotic meaning from falsely ordered space? I peer into the morass of architectural, alien, and biologic shapes on the cover of this album and it just makes me wonder more.

In its constant flurry of blastbeats, howling, and often gorgeous guitar passages, it offers up whatever it finds in those uprooted fibers of ordered muscular life as a sacrifice to memories — maybe they are not memories, maybe they are prophecies. Everything gives and slathers of deathly blackened disobedience tumble into the void. The somewhat archaic tones present in the title track ("O tragedy, thou long and radiant twilight / O rhapsody, a charnel roar then smooth and sudden silence") point to a literary goal, but the tactics are both unrelenting and oblique. No easy answers. All in all, something of a metaphysical sense to this mass of sound (with a capital "M"). I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Drouth in several end-of-the-year lists, but if I am to be honest, in giving oneself over to this listen, you may be forgiven for harboring any doubt that the end of this particular year may ever arrive. | Physical media on Eternal Warfare | 4 out of 5 stars.