Murder Madness In Your Ears

Picture yourself waking up in a location unknown, at a time unspecified. Your vision is blurry, your sense of self newly undefined. There’s blood dripping from your head onto your hands, wearing you better than the confused expression on your face. There’s a throbbing; a pulsating sensation from within you that makes for a disorienting soundtrack to your recent discovery.

In so many words, this is what Dark Buddha Rising’s September release, Inversum, can be summed up as. To be fair, the last eight years and six albums worth of this Finland-based band’s discography have been comprised of such enjoyable horror. Though with Inversum, almost a decade’s worth of detestation has been compacted into only a pair of tracks. Unlike its predecessor Dakhmandal, which featured a track for every consonant in the album’s name, Inversum only consist of two songs, “ESO” and “EXO.”

The album begins with “ESO,” a song that for the first few minutes is nothing but a suspenseful buildup. It isn’t until nearly eight minutes in that even the faintest hint of vocals enter, which are really nothing more than muffled screams and groans with tidbits of actual words. This has proven a tried and true vocal method among all of DBR’s releases. The drums and drone fervently appear around nine minutes, where “ESO” hits its heaviest. Crashing cymbals and a low tonality steadily creep about until around 18 minutes, where the bated swirling of riffs arise back into full fledge heaviness.

Adding to the auditory terror, “EXO” begins with the creaking of a chair or a door, backed up by what sounds like dying monks. Drums silence the vocals with the help of effects and feedback, until a sudden change in force becomes apparent. At around seven minutes “EXO” awakens like a jolt out a dream. The dancing between silence and discord carries on, exiting and entering without a moment’s notice. Yet it’s at the end of the song where we reach its climax – a sped up amalgamation of strained noise, nearly without any resolution. “EXO” abruptly ends, as if the last 23 minutes and 22 seconds had never happened.

With the number of songs barely worth being called an EP, yet a runtime of damn near a full length, Inversum is basically the music movie-murders are committed to. You take off your headphones wondering what sort of demonic mysticism overcame you and whether you’re really alone or not.