#the ailing facade

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AEVITERNE - The Ailing Facade

Profound Lore

2022

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"The Reeking Suns" by Aeviterne - From "The Ailing Facade" (2022)

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"The Gaunt Sky" by Aeviterne - From "The Ailing Facade" (2022)

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Aeviterne streaming new album The Ailing Facade in full

Band: AeviterneAlbum: The Ailing FacadeRelease Date: March 18th, 2022Label: Profound Lore RecordsPre-order: Bandcamp The Ailing Facade track listing: “Denature”“Still The Hollows’ Sway”“Penitent”“The Reeking Suns”“The Gaunt Sky”“Obeyance”“The Ailing Facade”“Dream in Lies” [via Invisible Oranges]

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Aeviterne — The Ailing Façade (Profound Lore Records)

Photo by Matthew Ahearn

The Ailing Facade by AEVITERNE

The phrase “progressive death metal” sounds like a sort of oxymoron. Prog is very often full of beard-stroking, axe-wanking ambition and intellectual grandiosity, and death metal — well, axes may be involved, but the work is frequently much wetter. It’s also the case that the metal subgenre is generally hostile to high-brow, metaphysical pretensions, preferring to roll around in the mud and the blood and the gooey digestive juices. But overheated rhetoric associated with both forms of music does run in some interesting parallels, especially when you tune into the technical end of death metal’s continuum. Difficulty, experimental structure and masterful musicianship are extolled, even worshipped (and we shouldn’t fail to note the complementary gesturing of some of Rick Wakeman’s more gloomily druidic costuming choices…). So, it’s both apt and a bit odd that Aeviterne’s new LP The Ailing Façade is being marketed as a progressive death metal record. The intellectual avidity and earnestness are certainly present. But the music?  

Put it this way: it ain’t Rush. It isn’t even Edge of Sanity — and thank goodness (or badness?) for that. Aeviterne’s sound has a piledriving quality, a relentless intensity that pummels you, when most proggy death metal wants to dazzle or dumbfound. There’s complexity in the songs on The Ailing Façade, but it’s akin to the complexity of running the 800 meters, rather than dancing Swan Lake. It’s punishing and exhausting. Check out “The Gaunt Sky,” which steamrolls along without pause for almost all of its five minutes, only breaking stride in its last 20 seconds. The gleams of synth that flash at intervals have a mechanical, industrial tonality. They don’t adorn so much as further enmesh you into the song’s furiously working gears.

There’s a slickness to the gears’ function. The LP has a professional polish on its production, but the fluidity of the performances is more than surface deep. Two of the players in Aeviterne (Eric Rizk, who plays bass, and Garret Bussanick, who supplies the guitars and vocals) have been making music together since at least 2005, most notably in death metal band Flourishing. Their long relationship issues in a nigh-intuitive blend of rhythms and textures—a flow that has a molten, not-quite coagulating quality. The Ailing Façade doesn’t include any of the more overwrought performativity of some recent proggy death metal, but Aeviterne’s songs create their own knottily tortuous structures. The result is a record with a compelling consistency. The band doesn’t mistake ceaseless shape-shifting for musical interest. They ride their riffs to their logical conclusions, which tend to be grim, alienated and existentially bare. Progress? Now? More likely death.  

Jonathan Shaw