Lycus - Chasms (2016)

Before dawn in an eastern seaboard still blanketed by snow and ice and having watched on the cable tv 60's-era low-income condemned apartments in Pacifica, CA get ready to fall into the ocean, what feels good is Lycus. Lycus are from Oakland and they feel good because they bring the epic, sorrowful doom which builds and builds its slow-war-chariot-action until it erupts into black metal blastbeats and harshed hissing and scratching without dropping the reverb and the echo and the chanting and the sorrow, which gets layered atop the black metal stuff and then the black metal stuff and the death moaning gets layered atop of that, but it never sounds messy, it sounds beautiful. This is music for watching continents slowly collapse into constituent elements, being eroded from within and without by wind and water. Ice dams have themselves decided to back up into our roof/ceiling apparatus and down into the walls. Lycus feels good. Lycus can't/won't stop the rock, but it can hold your hand as you watch it fall. Also, I would like to point out that Paolo Girardi once again provided an awesome painting for the cover of Chasms. Paolo Girardi for making iconic metal landscapes is up there with Dan Seagrave, and I do not say that lightly. Here is an interview with him courtesy of No Clean Singing: http://www.nocleansinging.com/2015/08/17/get-to-the-point-paolo-girardi/#more-95060 And here is a list of album covers he has worked on courtesy Encyclopedium Metallum: http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/Paolo_Girardi/260928