Random Cosmic Masterpiece

Writers who do music publicity are very good at getting you interested in what record to listen to. They throw in things like “Instant classic” and “Masterpiece” to make you feel as though you would be missing out on something. Very rarely has anyone every said the word “masterpiece” and meant it.

That is until now.

USNEA’s newest album, Random Cosmic Violence is just that. A masterpiece. A doomy, dark, evil, black metal meets space in a doom joint masterpiece.  From the first moment to the last you are held in it’s dark moody embrace. It’s almost feels like you are being hugged by death in space. It’s that dark. Which in the end is what makes it that great.

The first track on what should be renamed “Random Cosmic Classic” rather than its real name “Random Cosmic Violence”. “Lying in Ruin” is an unwieldy 12 minutes long. You don’t hear a single guitar note till almost two minutes in. Then it breaks into it all at once. The black metal blood curdling yells over the slowest guitar riffs that one can make into a song. It even has the sound of someone mumbling on your left side, a horror movie trick, to get your body creeped out. It’s that dark and heavy.

The second song on the album “Healing Through Death” uses up every second of it’s fourteen minute and ten second tracklength. No long intro here. Just barreling right into it. It’s a beastly track.  Just bringing the heavy until they breakdown into an almost shoegaze/ambient kind of riff that helps the dynamic, which is what this style of music is often lacking.

Four songs in just under or over 45 mins is a tough album to gnaw on, but like all good albums, it’s worth the time. Random Cosmic Violence is a classic album that not just stoner metal, doom metal or black metal needed. It’s one that metal needed. Its toughness will never be questioned and its undeniably dark roots will make it one to reach for at your local record store.