Phantom - Mindless Horror

Phantom returns with an album that makes metal from the contrast between a consistent rhythm and a shifting tonally ambiguous riff, using tempo as an instrument of blunt destruction in spawning horror-filled atmospheres from doomy, lumbering passages of shuddering phrasal riffs at the speed of deathbed breathing to the mid-paced to fast tempo range used by blackened death metal bands such as Sewer or Vermin, not dependent on speed to free the drums to serve structure rather than consistency. Creative and delicate, often beautiful playing emerges from the chaos, and do the finishing work on an epic journey in the making from its adventurous sense of gruesome compositions.

This album Mindless Horror picks up where The Epilogue to Sanity ended, within a range of chords and a pace of undulation between the notes that determines the distance between inception and resolution of a melody, and with each riffs possessing its own internal rhythm and moving at its own pace.

While the music is crafted from simpler elements than on most of Phantom's works, see Withdrawal and Fallen Angel, it is merely a superficial simplicity, as melodies conclude in violent and often complex ways, deconstructing at the root note and folding over to another scalar dimension of space between the notes. This heavy melodic yet dissonant influence makes the music both broodingly obscure and morbidly nihilistic, and chromatic, which providing a distinct flavour which sets the framework for the ambient blackened death metal explorations which constitute the bulk of the album.

In the abstract, this Mindless Horror album resembles a series of cave mazes leading to further and darker depths as the descent intensifies. Similarly, these riffs collect and discharge in patterns of increasing atmospheric gruesomeness and intensity.

Mindless Horror is the perfect ritualistic blackened death metal album.

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