diSEMBOWELMENT: Transcendence Into the Peripheral

Produced by diSEMBOWELMENT

Released: 1993

Back in the days before My Dying Bride and Anathema even existed, there was a two-piece grind band in Melbourne called Bacteria that decided after a little while to combine what they were doing with some things that were completely different. As a result of this, one of metal's most truly amazing bands came to be.Perhaps more than any other band, diSEMBOWELMENT is the true embodiment of crushing, soul-scarring doom. Their combination of epic, glacially-paced riffs, fuzzy, post-rock sonic architecture, mournful, tortured vocal atmospherics and blast beat violence was a truly unique recipe that has since been mirrored and echoed across the metal sphere but rarely as impressively or as compulsively.

Transcendence Into the Peripheral is diSEMBOWELMENT's only full-length release, a culmination of their experimental technique that remains untarnished due to the band's decision to split not long after it was released, and thereby ensuring a legacy that could not be sullied by an attempt to match or surpass it.With a mere seven tracks stretching the running time to almost an hour, Transcendence Into the Peripheral is neither an album for the faint-of-heart nor the attention-deficient. Psycroptic and Dillinger Escape Plan squeeze more riffs into one song than diSEMBOWELMENT use on this entire album, but the dark, brooding introspection and mystical reflection conjured by the languid drone of a track like "A Burial at Ornans" is the exact and diametric opposite of the shock and awe tactics of those bands.

The album opens with "The Tree of Life and Death", a strange combination of grind, death and ambience that was the inspiration for the Alchemist track "Soul Return" that came out two years later. diSEMBOWELMENT's minimalist style is perfectly represented here. Incredibly slow riffs reverberate forever until an occasional vicious blastbeat or grind section comes from out of nowhere and then subside again almost immediately for a truly haunting atmospheric section to take its place. Vocals ooze out of the distance as a variety of low, growling rumbles, whispers, shouts and chants that only accentuate the band's stark aura of dismal gloom. That's just the first track. "Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory" is bleaker still, with a soul-withering atmosphere almost painful to endure. The gentle acoustics of "Nightside of Eden" belie the abyssic despair of its spoken-word poetry as what at first seems like a lighthouse of hope is merely a corpse-light amidst further gloom.

Then diSEMBOWELMENT rolls out the depressing triumph of "A Burial at Ornans", a hope-crushing fourteen-minute colossus so slow the main riff drones on for almost a minute and a half. This track is a genuinely remarkable achievement, the centrepiece of the album's agonising existential journey, a journey completed by "Cerulean Transcience of All My Imagined Shores" that slowly lifts the listener up from the depths of mortal despair and through a gateway to ethereal existence.

Transcendence Into the Peripheral is precisely as its title suggests, the most complete musical metaphor for spiritual enlightenment thus far conceived and an unassailable masterpiece never to be bettered.

1. The Tree of Life and Death


2. Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory


3. Excoriate


4. Nightside of Eden


5. A Burial at Ornans


6. The Spirits of the Tall Hills


7. Cerulean Transcience of All My Imagined Shores

Rating: 100%