Eibon - "II" ...

It’s doubtable that the Hyperborean world had such great music, but Paris’s fearsome quintet Eibon sure do make the case for a more primitive brand of metal. Combining black metal with the plodding, bludgeoning pacing of doom-infused sludge, Eibon, who are vocalist Georges Balafas, guitarists Max Hedin and Guillaume Taliercio, bassist Stephane Riviere, and Jerome Lachaud, present crushing tones and even heavier dissonance on their latest album, which is simply called II.

There is something degenerate in II: from the menacing and misanthropic duo of “The Void Settlers” and “Elements of Doom” to the grotesque cover art, Eibon’s newest invective against the world is hate à la française. The word choice here of “degenerate” is intentional, for the album’s cover (which is taken from Otto Dix’s War Triptych) presents not only the degradation of warfare, but the artist himself was labeled a “degenerate” by none other than the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.



Rather than just being an invocation of the art of the Weimar Republic (which is known for its dour pessimism and its surrealistic violence), II is an exhausting two-track album that performs a marathon march towards oblivion. On “The Void Settlers,” Balafas unleashes his black metal-like shrieks over a steady beat of pounding, yet simplistic chords. “The Void Settlers” begins as a somewhat mid-tempo monster before transforming into a feedback-laden doom crawl that beats the listener into abject submission. “Elements of Doom” does something similar, although its slough is much deeper and far more protracted. “Elements of Doom,” with its rainswept moments and its slow sludge-meets-war metal complexities, is a fitting title for a song that presents a Discordian conjuring; a spell of ire from a band named after Clark Ashton Smith’s primordial wizard and his ancient tome of hideous lore.

II at times comes close to doom metal prog rock, and its many instrumental passages only further enhance the record’s gloomy ambience. Like Burzum’s Filosofem, II approaches the well-traveled space of heavy metal with a deep-seated attachment to minimalism. II may lack melody and the conventional song structures that we all know so well, but its abrasiveness belies a metalgaze core - an atmospheric quality that sounds very much like electric funeral music. In just two songs, II will lead you to believe in the transcendental aspects of metal without also accepting the type of pretentious buffoonery and poorly disguised navel-gazing that comes along with the term “transcendental metal.”

Track List:
1.    The Void Settlers
2.    Elements of Doom

II is currently available from Throatruiner Records/Aesthetic Death

Words: Benjamin Welton

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