52. Doedsmaghird - "Omniverse Consciousness"

Those of you who are long-time subscribers will recall a decidedly odd album from last year by Dødheimsgard entitled "Black Medium Current”. It did very strange things with black metal, introverting and recalibrating the entire genre into very bizarre and convoluted shapes. Well Doedsmaghird is a side project of two of the members of Dødheimsgard. They take the off-kilter eccentricity of their day job and just accelerate. This is a fabulously off-the-wall psychedelic mix mash of an album.

It is highly unconventional and plays fast and loose with anything that can be seen as musical dogmas or templates. Every note, every passage and every refrain feels bent out of shape. Anything that can be defined as music is warped and manipulated until it operates in a juxtaposition to its usual calibration. The vocals fluctuate in an unsettling manner and the instruments sound like they’re being stretched and shredded.

What you can’t do though, is stop listening. It is a fascinating record because it just seems so different to anything else. It loops around itself continually changing in shape and direction. There are no discernible patterns and it’s hard to assess where anything begins or ends. It is the lack of structure, and the refusal to cohere to any form of process that entices you as a listener. An utter oddity that somehow manages to take your breath away with the magnificence of its strangeness.