#last agony

[trve-grimdark]

Last Agony The Imminent Slaughter

[montreal-diy]

[dustedmagazine]

Last Agony — The Imminent Slaughter (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

The Imminent Slaughter by Last Agony

Does rage make a sound? Enraged people do: grunts, shouts, expostulations and shrieks. But rage is an affective state — the idea of such a state, really — that’s hard to conceive in absence of its embodied expressions. Maybe that’s a good thing, given the destructive and vicious experiences that linger adjacent to the idea. Even more dangerous are the intoxicating feelings that often attend rage, the rush of adrenaline, the absolute certainty that this feeling is justified. Numerous genres in the sonic continuum we seem to be calling “extreme music” (a phrase this reviewer strongly dislikes; too close to intrinsically obnoxious cultural constructs like “extreme sports,” “extreme tourism” and so on) romanticize rage, and fetishize it, in the Marxian sense more so than the Freudian. Toronto-based crust band Last Agony attempts to represent rage musically, and in doing so, the band engages the term’s essential ugliness. The result is a record that sometimes borders on incoherence, but also feels completely intentional. The Imminent Slaughter is compelling stuff, strong medicine for a sickened world.

The incoherence is more stylistic than stylized. You encounter it in the semiotics of the titling language, in that it’s hard to hold the idea of a “Last Agony” in your head alongside an “Imminent Slaughter.” The temporalities conflict, the imminent’s emergence re-engaging and colliding with the termination of the last. The confused relations to time find their realized complement in the music, in which d-beat pulses slide into chaotic barrages of noise, and overdriven guitars buzz and grind through electrifying whirlwinds of distortion. Occasionally the characteristic textures and rhythms of raw punk form songs that can withstand their own explosive energies; “Vile Egotistical Conduct (Demented Ego, Pt. II)” evokes early Extreme Noise Terror, and “Diabolism” conjures the most musical moments on the Execute’s Live in Hell (1984). 

But the best tracks on The Imminent Slaughter give themselves over to their inherent disorder, their convulsions of furor. “Maniac” commences with a legible riff, which re-emerges on occasion. But mostly it’s a maelstrom, a cataract of noise. “Hacked Pieces” may be the most unhinged 99 seconds of sound on the record, and also its most effective. Throughout The Imminent Slaughter, it’s pretty much impossible make sense of CLT’s shouted and growled vocals. “Hacked Pieces” leaves language entirely behind, the shouts elongating into howls of something like animosity, something like pain. It’s a challenging musical experience to endure — certainly it would be difficult to contain in the brightly seductive contours of the commodity form. 

Music this tough and noisy is all sharp edges and jagged corners. They slice and stab through any safe or pleasant packaging. And there’s no winks or nods to salacious thrill, the sort of exploitative, faux-transgressive nonsense you too often encounter in extreme music (see brutal death metal, the sophomorically knucklehead antics of slam, and so on). This is dirty, sweaty, angry crust, the sonic equivalent to a punch in the throat that you sort of deserve. Not fun, but likely necessary. For some reason, even inasmuch as all that is true, I can’t stop playing The Imminent Slaughter. It’s a terrific — if unpleasant, and terrific because it’s unpleasant — record.

 Jonathan Shaw

[kvltklvb]

Last Agony Demo 2018

[purgatorialsociety]

O my Jesus! Grant that my last breath may be spent uttering thine adorable Name!

The faithful are granted a plenary indulgence at the hour of death by pronouncing with reverence the Holy Name of Jesus. It is also necessary, in order to gain the papal indulgence in the hour of death, to pronounce at least in mind the Name of Jesus.

[purgatorialsociety]

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. O my God, I have certainly to die, but I know not when, how, or where I shall die; this only I know: that if I die in mortal sin, I shall be lost forever. Most blessed Virgin Mary, holy Mother of God, pray for me a sinner, now and at the hour of my death. Amen. Beati mortui, qui in Domino moriuntur. O mi Deus, moriendum mihi est certo, sed nescio quando, quomodo, ubi moriar; hoc unum scio, me in æternum periturum, si in peccato lethali expirem. Beatissima Virgo Maria, Mater Dei Sancta, ora pro me peccatore, nunc et in hora mortis meæ. Amen.

Pius X, January 12, 1906

[theraccolta]

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, bless us now and at the hour of our death.