Album review: The Amenta – Plague of Locus

By BRIAN GIFFIN

YOU may have heard some of these songs before, but you probably haven’t heard them the way The Amenta presents them on their latest album.

With The Amenta boasting a long and deserved reputation as one of Australia’s best and foremost exponents of dark and abrasive sonic terror, Plague of Locus is an exploration of their roots, a reinvention of the very music that inspired them. It is, of course, a precipitous journey that turns and detours into some unexpected places while peeling back the layers of their malevolent creativity.

Tracks like Halo’s “Rise” and Nazxul’s “Totem” reflect the swirling pandemonic chaos The Amenta brings to their own material; “Crystal Lakes” from Lord Kaos’ sadly brief catalogue reveals a deep reverence for Australia’s black metal heritage in its shrieking faithfulness. Each of these divulge a different aspect of the multi-faceted countenance of The Amenta’s swirling dissonance, caustic riffs and murky, harrowing soundscapes.

With the early My Dying Bride classic “Black God” and Diamanda Galas’ “Sono l’Antichristo”, the band explores a dark Gothic beauty not always so evident in the fierce noise they usually create, but ever lurking in the quieter spaces.

Elsewhere, Plague of Locus delivers tracks that are both surprising and fitting to The Amenta’s aesthetic. Killing Joke’s “Asteroid” is given swathes of tortured violin and Cain Cressel’s angry bark strongly mimicking Jaz Coleman’s own frenzied shrieking, the stripped-down attack and cracking drumming giving it a fittingly searing anarcho-industrial-punk treatment. “Angry Chair” is the album’s most unexpected inclusion, yet Alice In Chains’ murky and depressive gloom and existentialist torment is perfectly fitting with The Amenta’s mission. Layne Staley’s masterpiece of frustration, self-loathing and rage becomes a plodding, abyssal nightmarish soundscape of sinister darkness. If anyone could add further agony to such a track, The Amenta succeed here.

The sole original, “Plague of Locus” sits at the centre of the chaos, all blasting drums, theremin screech and eerily cryptal vocals like haunting revisitation of their n0n album, a lynchpin that both divides and separates the sonic mayhem.

Stark, haunting, beautiful, dark and ferocious, Plague of Locus is everything that exists at the heart of The Amenta’s extraordinary creative abyss. Explore at your peril.