In crafting their debut LP, Agony’s Bespoke, Blighted Eye claims to draw heavy inspiration from Jennifer Kent’s 2018 film The Nightingale. The film follows an Irish ex-convict seeking revenge on the British settlers who raped her and murdered her husband and infant child.1 Its honest portrayal of the hollowness of vengeance and the psychological impact of trauma are aspects Blighted Eye aims to transfer to its own interpretation of transformative tragedy. In the appropriately epic span of an hour, Agony’s Bespoke weaves a tapestry of hauntingly familiar progressive death and black metal that hides a few gut-wrenching punches in its deceptively cerebral folds.
The unlikely convergence of technical death metal and funeral doom gives rise to Blighted Eye’s stirring character. With members from Aethereus on guitars, vocals, and bass respectively, and a drummer from acts Mesmur and Pantheist, Blighted Eye’s pedigree is steeped in two very different interpretations of grandiosity and heady emotionality. Not that there’s more than a hint of doominess about Agony’s Bespoke, but the influence is noteworthy, as it helps produce an unusually affective strain of progressive extreme metal. I’m reminded of a hybrid of Hath and Alustrium, and even some Wake-isms rear their head, not purely in terms of literal sound, but in the intense feeling expressed in an otherwise niche, inaccessible musical style. From the many vibrant charges of frenetic, key-changing guitarwork and rhythmic complexity, to the swooping soloing and occasional moments of stillness, a strong thread of pathos runs unbroken through the album.
Agony’s Bespoke by Blighted Eye
The use of intricate, extreme instrumentality to compel rather than alienate the listener is where Blighted Eye shows its mettle. Acrobatic solos don’t just dazzle with technicality, they impress in their development of the predominantly mournful themes (“In Enmity,” “A Feast for Worms”). Undulating, punctuating percussion isn’t just exhilarating and groovy, its tempo changes and crescendos sway the listener to the rhythm of Agony’s Bespoke’s tragedy, telling us when to breathe and when to release the tension wrought in clashing dissonance and torrential blastbeats (“The Wounding,” “Howls from Beyond the Mist,” “A Reverent Stillness”). And the key to it all is some of the most beautiful refrains technical death metal has to offer. With a shivery lick of excitement comes the tumbling main melody of opener “Tragoedia,” almost out of nowhere, yet inevitable from the restless anticipation of cymbal shuffling, and gradually intensifying riffs. With plaintive urgency, wailing lines (“In Emnity,” “Pallid,” and “A Reverent Stillness”) and blackened tirades (“The Wounding”) work together with vicious roars to smash open your ribcage and wrench your heart out of your chest, as the tempos batter you about in this tempest of emotion to the bounce of a fluttering riff (“Tragoedia,” “A Reverent Stillness”).
The only thing holding Blighted Eye back is ambition. As stirring as Agony’s Bespoke is, its strength is diluted by the runtime that overextends the reach of even the strongest tracks beyond their grasp. No song, save the short interlude, “Nightingale,”2 is less than six minutes long, and most could stand to lose a minute or so. There is the sense that the band had so many great ideas, they wanted to include them all. Take, for instance, the decisively dissonant death metal that characterizes “Pallid,” and the haunting, bleating cleans that arise here and there (“Howls from Beyond the Mist,” and the title track). The former is brilliantly executed, and leads to one of the best cuts on the album, though tonally it sticks out and is a little underdeveloped. The latter fits more naturally into the stylistic template but is a tad less strong. The music would also have benefitted from a more spacious mix that would allow its layered intricacies to allow the room to breathe and deliver the impact it is capable of. It’s nothing that can’t be improved upon and tightened up in the next release, though.
Agony’s Bespoke is, despite its flaws, a powerful record, and one for whom even the sin of an overlong runtime can’t truly detract from the impact it leaves on its audience. As it draws to a close, you do feel as though you’ve been on a journey, one whose peaks are worth its valleys. If this is what Blighted Eye can do in their debut, the scene had better be ready when they return to tell their next tale.
Rating: Very Good
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s CBR mp3
Label: Beyond the Top
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024
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