Album Reviews

 

 

Album Review: The Gnomes, Misantropus by Stefan K.

 

Misantropus's 2015 album release, The Gnomes, exhibits an uncompromising commitment to conceptually progressive instrumental doom metal. The album's four tracks – ranging from about eight to thirteen minutes in length – feature relentlessly motor-rhythmic guitar, hard-hitting drums, and a driving but unobtrusive bass. They mix to produce a sound that is unprocessed, focused, and powerful. But Misantropus doesn’t leave it there. They introduce and punctuate their music with an array of ominous sounds and tonal effects, creating an atmosphere at once creepy and strangely reverent.

 

Although each track centers on a gyrating pattern of chords, this pattern is occasionally broken up by a sudden tempo slow-down, as in the first two tracks, “The Gnomes” and “Salamander.” During this break, guitar and bass stop playing in layered unison and become two voices in stately harmony. The simple grandeur of these interludes contrasts effectively with the ferocity of the main riff.

 

Every track has an extended outro section, which sometimes includes a tempo change-up or some churning solo guitar work, e.g. “The Salamander.” Don’t expect mindless shredding, however. Misantropus’s guitarist, Alessio Sannito, plays deliberately and concisely, confining himself to the lower and middle registers of the pentatonic scale. When the guitar doesn’t dominate, the outro comes alive with eerie noises – a procession of slow crescendos, ghostly echoes, chopping and dripping sounds, and other nameless things. These are particularly prominent in “Undines,” the album’s third track, and “Elfs,” the fourth and final track.

 

Chronicling Misantropus’s history and recent activity, Minotauro Records, the band’s label, has posted the following description on its website: “The conceptual significance of the new album, entitled The Gnomes, is once again related to environmental and spiritual themes. The album is dedicated to the four natural elements and to the entities that represent them.” It would require greater familiarity with Misantropus’s philosophical and mythological influences than the present reviewer possesses to relate the album’s guiding themes to its four tracks in any detail. Speaking generally and speculatively, however, The Gnomes evokes the wonder and mystery of the earth’s deep ecology. Consequently, a feeling of quasi-religious awe and intense vitality permeates each track. One hears this in the interplay between the earthly and unearthly noises which fill the album’s prelude, interludes, and coda, on the one hand, and the insistent, overdriven guitar which functions as the living core of each track, on the other. And while some listeners might find Alessio’s guitar work too cyclic, this reviewer found himself hypnotized by its propulsive rhythm – a sort of Hindu chant to the hidden, chthonic order.

 

In sum, Misantropus’s has produced an album which puts the non-human world at its center, making no effort whatsoever to be people-friendly or “popular.” This music moves at its own pace – it is not rushed, but patiently carves out large spaces for its ideas. Fortunately, it doesn’t succumb to meditative abstraction. In the end, it is still good, hard rock.