Epistasis – Light Through Dead Glass

Epistasis
Light Through Dead Glass
Crucial Blast
★★★★

What is considered a mini album for this Maryland-based experimental extreme band, the follow-up to 2012 self-titled endeavor is a thunderous blow to anyone’s perception of what extremist measures can be.

The notes are excruciating to convey just how impacting they can be. It’s enough to turn doom metallers upside down with jaws agape. The music on Light Through Dead Glass is incredible. Epistasis are no fools. They know how to beat you down until you just succumb to their torturous blinding of the human will.

But what will really get you is the group’s panache for bravery and unwillingness to conform. They can plow through extremism as easily as they can delicately pluck away at the inner linings of expressive instrumental gaze. What it leads to is something not quite human; something so familiar to us yet something so inhuman it becomes a parallelism that turns something familiar into something strange.

But there is a duality present from within the band. Amy Mills’ vocals or shall I say vocal shrieking is beyond comprehension. It’s so much so that it sometimes becomes too much. I would rather listen to this album as an instrumental than hear incomprehensible vocal interruptions. The soft guitar tinges on “Finistre.” The looming background of “Gray Ceiling” is ominous. And the powerful extremity of “Gown of Yellow Stars” keeps things into perspective and reminds us that the purpose of Epistasis is for avante garde shock using music as art.