Eryn Non Dae. – Abandon of the Self (Debemur Morti)

Monday, 12th March 2018
Rating: 7.5/10

The intrinsically obtuse quality to Eryn Non Dae’s music (there’s actually a period at the end of the band’s name, but let’s not get too fancy here) makes them a difficult reach. They’re always at an arm’s length, whether in structure or execution; their songs more like a whirl through the avant-garde modern metal tunnel than a headlong dive into heaviness, something they attempted on 2009’s Hydra Lernaia. Since albums come every once and a while for the Frenchman (they were last heard on 2012’s Meliora), their new Abandon of the Self comes with the appropriate amount of discord and eeriness.

There’s often little direction with these cuts (seven in all), as Eryn Non Dae plot difficult routes with disharmonic riffing, volume swells and a multitude of vocals. The aforementioned swells are what gives “Stellar” their lift, though, a trip through a futuristic, cold wasteland of post-industrial and post-metal, if you will. The careful plods of “Omni” are blended with sparse tom-work and guitars at a minimum, while the heavy chord crashes of “Halo” is where Eryn Non Dae makes the biggest impact, a bubbling summation of Abandon of the Self’s crashing, unsettled that is followed up mightily by “Fragment.”

Next to impossible to pin Eryn Non Dae down, which, perhaps is the point of the whole thing. Look at it this way: They’d be run into the ground if they tried to keep up with Gojira, so why not head in the opposite direction? Abandon of the Self is a mind-boggle that never settles, never rests, casting Eryn Non Dae as artful separatists.

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