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GENEVIEVE   Escapism   CASSETTE   (Grimoire)    5.00



����� One hell of an impressive first album from these fellow Maryland mutants. I'd heard and dug some of their earlier stuff, but on Escapism these guys have nailed down a creepy and crushing avant-metal assault of their own, exploring a fascination with psychedelic guitar meanderings, improvisation and experimental noise. Their name might infer something a little more "delicate", but the music is pretty harsh, a frenzied combination of blackened math metal and twisted noise rock that ends up sounding pretty unusual.

����� Their creepy dissonance descends over the ambient opener "Parasite I", where metallic, almost sitar-like drones bleed into a gorgeous, orchestral driftscape. But "Charnel Flow" detonates that placid, dreamlike ambience with a furious combination of off-kilter black metal-style melody, hideous discordant riffs and a maniacal level of aggression. That blackened influence is constantly felt throughout Genevieve's sound, but there's also this frantic, frayed-nerve feel to all of this stuff that just as often reminds me of Today Is The Day's vicious metallic noise rock. The songs proceed to erupt with pummeling death metal-esque double bass, eerie atonal melodies, and lots of skronky, jagged riffage, careening through a demented landscape of howling feedback and blasting blackened dissonance. As it slips into gruesome slow-motion dirge and churning math-metal chaos, the deranged, vocals and monstrous guttural roars blend together for a maximum psychotic effect, and that blackened noise rock vibe is always there beneath the surface, jutting out of even the fastest and most frigid blastscapes.

����� There are a few deviations from that heavier stuff, like the psych-guitar instrumental that makes up the title track, and some of the songs feature weird underwater guitar effects and odd crooning vocals that can swerve the album into vaguely Lynchian territory. There's a moment on the song "Fell" where it suddenly shifts into hauntingly pretty gloom-rock for a second, laced with mournful slide guitar-like textures, and elsewhere Genevieve use both baritone guitar and fretless guitar to add unique tonal qualities to their sound. At the end, Escapism closes with a reprise of that strange sitar-like drone from the beginning, but it's stretched across an eight-minute outro that turns increasingly dread-inducing, layered in weird chittering electronics, distant horn-like blasts, and flurries of swirling black drift. Those weird ambient stretches definitely give this an odd, dreamlike feel at times, but for the most part, this album is set to pulverize, spewing a lurching, necrotic nightmare that's easily one of the coolest things coming out of the Baltimore area right now.


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