Tenebrae Annex - Poltergeist

 Released: October 28

This recent album from Tenebrae Annex is, in no uncertain terms, intense. It’s dark, haunting, grinding and gnashing album that is positively epic in length as well. Sitting at 25 tracks of this madness, it’s both a captivating and engaging listen but also a bit of a tough one to get through at points. Now, even though it’s broken down into 25 tracks, it feels very much like a continuous experience throughout and there’s no real breaks from the intensity save for fleeting moments. It almost evokes visions of the Inferno by Dante, feeling like we’re on a journey that just continues to grow more dark and festering as it goes on until we come to the inevitable end. 

What is particularly interesting about the way the music is put together is that it doesn’t really just on heavy distortions to make it’s point. Of course there is plenty of that though, coming through in long or short bursts of aggression and energy that piece through the otherwise atmospheric hellscape of the album. But it’s that atmospheric hellscape aspects that I really like to focus on here. There’s just this seething undercurrent present in every track that is expressed through a variety of tactics, with the final track showing off one of my favorites. “Yes. No. Goodbye.” along with several other tracks has this organ-like element that sounds like it was run through onslaught. It gives a haunting element to the track that couldn’t be expressed through hellish noise alone. “A Portrait Like Kafka” takes a different approach as it opens up with gnashing fangs of noise that dissipate into soft airy textures and high pitched drones, making it feel like being in a cave where industrial grade violence happens. 

The album, as I said is particularly intense all around. But it’s cleverly uses periods of contrasting space (note: even that space is not really soft) to accentuate the moments of hellish intensity. It’s a cleverly assembled collage of ear-shredding noises and atmospheric creep that I found to be a rather rewarding, if not slightly arduous, listen.