I'm honestly ashamed to admit it, but Igorrr's Spirituality and Distortion completely snuck up on me. I was looking through some lists of albums that dropped this past year to see if I missed anything decent that I'd want to comment on, and low and behold, this release caught my eye like a fishhook through a perch's gill. Savage Sinusoid, their fifth album, was easily one of the best metal releases of 2017, and Spirituality and Distortion is both a direct sequel and a better-articulated version of its predecessor.
Something that is exclusively the purview of Igorrr at this moment is the seamless weft and warp of breakbeats with Balkan and Eastern folk music, a hybridization which is shockingly compatible the group's similarly, sense confounding patterns of intricately interwoven death and black metal. The transition from more pure blasts and tremolos to programmed-rhythms borrowed from hardcore techno and progressive chord contortions stripped from the night terrors of a sentient midi are part of a terraforming process that began on the later half of Savage Sinusoid and has now flowered into a twisted Edan on Spirituality and Distortion. It's hard to overstate how extraordinary a lot of what I'm hearing here is, and repeated listens only reveal more layers. I would say that it seems probable that the group's mastermind Gautier Serre has been allowing his brain fat to languidly stew in the bracing new-age, corpse-soup Chicago blackened-fusion artist Fire-Toolz, but I doubt even Macloid is bold enough to venture as far into the caverns and enclaves of the mountains of madness that peek in the breach of the human soul as Serre is precariously prone to do.
Easily the most straightforward track on this entire album is "Parpaing" which features the inimitable, rending gnash of Cannibal Corpse singer George Fisher, and sounds like a death metal music video straining to come through an old rabbit-eared TV as it sparks and implodes in the jaws of a garbage compactor. It's not a bland or bad track, but it just fails to grab and hold the attention as much as the Turkish guitars, death-doom grooves, bell-led percussion, spidery harp rhythms and bewitching eastern melodies of "Himalaya Massive Ritual," where frequent collaborator Laure Le Prunenec sounds like Bjork being burnt at the stake and attempting to, and mightily succeeding at, extinguishing the flames around her with the wind and whip of her voice. "Lost in Introspection" feels like the sound you might hear echoing forever in the rooms of a victorian mansion that remain standing after it was burnt down in a mysterious blaze one evening during a rave, the victims of which continue to dance a ghoulish gambol of the damned to a baying saw of strings and a becoming classical piano traipse, egged on by churlish, sputtering blast-beats, and the devilish smirk of a Spanish guitar.
I could go on, but I'd be afraid that I'd never been able to stop. At over an hour in length, Spirituality and Distortion is almost too complex of an album to fully unpack in a single review. Excess has a new frontier, and at present, it's sole cartographer is Igorrr.
