Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Album Review: Likane Leppäne - Psykosomaattistasaundia

Over 7.5 thousand kilometers separate Oulu, Finland from Memphis, Tennessee. Such great divides haven't impeded Likane Leppäne from making a home for himself in horrorcore's shallow and often-disturbed grave thoughPsykosomaattistasaundia is Likane Leppäne's fourth LP, and doesn't see the artist fashioning a new coffin from which to shout his incredibly obscene-sounding, coarse and barking flow into the vermin-clotted earth. The space he's carved for himself in the unhospitable dirt of international underground rap seems capable of baring black-twisted fruit with a sweet, gory center- so why replant your plot when you can simply re-till and re-fertilize with fresh marrow? That's where I feel like I find Likane Leppäne on this release, living more luxuriously in his sunken, necrotic abode- his sonic sarcophagus- a fresh viscous paint on the walls, furniture refurbished with fresh skin, and a newly installed HVAC breathing a greasy miasma all over the dungeon-like interior of his wicked little keep. He's sick and slick, with a bone to pick... preferably one from your soon-to-be mangled carcass. Something that I appreciate about Likane Leppäne's tone and delivery, and the way it coasts over the burnt-out beats and phantasmic synths of his compositions, is that the macabre weight of his words as they settle into the ugly atmosphere of each song produces an inescapably ominous simulation of a world that is sinking away from the light of reason and into a bed of chaos. His work presents a vantage point from below, a bedrock of madness where he already resides and where the rest of reality appears in a rush to meet him. A logical future destination for our civilization that would make even the nightmares depicted in such survival horror classics as Cry of Fear or Silent Hill appear acceptably mundane. Likane Leppäne is the corrupted protagonist in this future landscape of woe, a man already conditioned to its harsh and surreal demands, willing to spare you a shred of his heathen wisdom so that you might stand a chance at surviving until daybreak. 

Reign in blood... Solium Records