Theologian

Chasms Of My Heart

Crucial Blast

CD $12.00

11/27/2012 655035020129

CBR 101 CD

MP3 $9.90

11/27/2012 655035020129

On his debut album for Crucial Blast The Further I Get From Your Star..., Theologian mastermind Leech established a new trajectory for his unique brand of pitch-black, rhythm-heavy industrial music that he’d previously explored with Navicon Torture Technologies. Under this new name, the power electronics and death industrial influences were twisted into even darker, more majestic sounds, crafting something significantly more atmospheric, reaching into new extremes of experience. On Theologian’s latest, The Chasms of My Heart, this sound is perfected, incorporating more melody and percussion into the long, oppressive dead-world ambience and pummeling electronic doomscapes.
Chasms opens with Theologian’s most stirring and evocative piece of music to date. Monumental end-time dirge “Abandon All Hope” starts off as a swirling ocean of blackened synthesizer roar before introducing pounding metallic percussion and skull-rattling bass frequencies. At first, it’s the sort of pitch-black, apocalyptic death-synth heaviness that Theologian has long claimed as its own, but when the layered vocals pour in, soaked in distortion and climbing skyward in a gloriously miserable multi-part harmony above an eerie, minor-key hook, it becomes something new. Like some kind of hellish fusion of industrialized shoegaze and thunderous power electronics, “Abandon All Hope” reveals a new side to Theologian’s black-hole sound that is explored further throughout these eight tracks.
There’s no shortage of Theologian’s trademark black ambience here, though. The frantic, clanking rhythms on “We Can’t All Be Victims” becomes a backdrop to a maelstrom of monochrome drone and howling demonic noise, obscuring the nightmarish cacophony of choral voices, screaming feedback and epic strings buried deep below. “Starvation Is a Legitimate Weapon of War” summons an ocean of abyssal low-end churn and rumble that spreads out into infinity; the crushing orchestral power of “My Body Is Made of Ash...I Live as Ash,” where titanic, distorted synth-pulses echo up from vast, lightless depths, evokes images of monstrous crematoriums belching smoke and cinder into the skies, extinguishing the sun as raging vocals rise and war-drums pound relentlessly in the blackness.