ESOCTRILIHUM - Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath

Come on! How can anyone be expected to listen and write reviews as fast as Asthâghul is putting out new ultra-long and and convoluted avant-garde black/death metal mind-melt infernos with Esoctrilihum?

ESOCTRILIHUM - Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath (CD) (2021)

So once again we listen to a strange tale of cosmic horrors, told in an ancient language noone alive and mortal understands, in twelve chapters of insane... let's call it I, Voidhanger Records madness.

And again his one-man project Esoctrilihum somehow pulls it off to create an album which exactly matches the mood of its weird nightmarish cover artwork.

Compared to "Eternity Of Shaog" Asthâghul uses less classical and folk instrumentation here, but in compensation for that all the more doubles down on the keyboards, which float above and within the blasting and shredding spiral of insanity in multiple layers at all times. Combined with an ominously droning bass this achieves a maelstromy underwater vibe, which also translates to the theme of demonic telepathy and almost feels like a hellish parallel universe version of "Aquaman". Except this inferno is not at all a horrible mess like that movie.

Yes, "Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath" is also way too much and I'll never be able to listen to this stuff often and attentive enough to fully comprehend it. But unlike the CGI shit sling from Hollywood, these lovecraftish black/death epics from France are always over-excessive in the best way.

The only hairs I can find in this soup remain the same as on the previous albums:

1. The very compressed sound sometimes makes it physically hard to continuously listen to this, so it always becomes somewhat challenging towards the last third of each album, even though the music itself is filled to the brim with great ideas and relentless, addictive extreme metal annihilation.

2. Fix your fucking fade-outs!
This one has grown to a serious, avoidable nuisance by now. Many tracks have fade-outs and they are much, much too fast. Especially when you're listening at high volume - which I assume is expected -, they sound terribly hasty, cheap and loveless. And given the enormous amount of work and creativity going into Esoctrilihum I just don't get why this weak point even is a thing at all.  

Yet as much as this annoys me, it doesn't stop "Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath" from being another masterpiece.

Once again I chose to the CD version, which comes in a DVD size digipak.

Of course I have broken off the tiniest piece of the holder when I took the disc out for the first time, so it doesn't really do its full job anymore. Fucking risk of all digipaks... But at least this shit looks good, right?