Cloak Of Altering

Cloak Of Altering

Manifestation

Crucial Blast

One of many alter-egos of the notorious Dutch industrial black metal outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak of Altering returns to deliver the followup to the maniacal 2014 album Plague Beasts, unleashing yet another brain-scrambling blast of mutated symphonic black metal, nightmarish breakcore madness and hellish electronics fused together into a sweat-soaked, chrome-plated nightmare. Compared to previous works, the seven-song Manifestation is a slightly less chaotic monstrosity, giving these blackened maelstroms added room to breathe, but the cumulative assault continues to thoroughly scorch the listener. The sound is still rooted in a bizarre confluence of synth-drenched black metal, skewed industrial heaviness and fractured Planet Mu-esque electronic music, seemingly as informed by the hallucinatory throes of early Coil and the violent breakcore of Bong-Ra and Venetian Snares as it is by classic Nordic black metal. Strange contrapuntal riffs weave drunkenly amid crackling electronic glitch and eerie drones. Mournful synthscapes unfold across glacial rhythms and distorted doom-laden dirges. Blasts of foul, industrialized death metal pummel erupt alongside ominous piano figures and swells of sickening orchestral dissonance. One notable difference from previous works are the vocals, which take form as a vile, guttural robotic croak—a sickeningly putrid android presence layered among the rest of the distant shrieks, anguished screams and chilling, garbled cries.  As always, Cloak of Altering balances this electronically deformed madness with strikingly beautiful and majestically bleak melodic passages. Blasts of bombastic, heavily atmospheric synthesizer roar across songs like “Parasitic Altering Sickness” and “Hidden Celestial Deity.” An arresting, alien album, Manifestation...

Cloak Of Altering

Plague Beasts

Crucial Blast

Although most known for his notorious blackened industrial / orchestral doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, Dutch avant-metal madman Mories is also involved in a number of projects rooted in a more recognizably “black metal” sound. One of ’em is Cloak of Altering, started in 2011 as a continuation the band Ophiuchus. Their previous albums explored the early symphonic black metal of In the Nightside Eclipse-era Emperor and Arcturus’s early efforts, as well as the more fiendish and fractured forms of industrial black metal as practiced by the likes of Dödheimsgard. Moving deeper into strange and more mutated realms, Cloak of Altering’s third full-length delivers a ferocious affront to black metal form and structure, combining his otherworldly strain of sweeping, symphonic black metal with bursts of intense electronic chaos, waves of nebulous synthesizer, and spastic, violent rhythms. Twisted melodies seethe and swarm throughout the album, resembling a nightmare version of prog rock keyboard freak-outs, or vintage 16-bit game soundtracks fused to the gristle and graveyard stink of second-wave black metal. As with Mories’s other projects (Aderlating, De Magia Veterum, Seirom, etc.), Plague Beasts deforms traditional elements into something even more surreal, but where Gnaw Their Tongues features heavy use of orchestral sounds, Cloak of Altering submerges these elements beneath fuzz-enshrouded riffs and swirling elliptical synths, melting those symphonic influences into a psychotic cyborg stew of washed-out trip-hop rhythms, discordant tremolo riffs, bizarre gurgling vocals, and swells of stunning, almost shoegazey majesty that wash over the music, imbuing it for a moment...