Album Review: Kassad – London Orbital (Hypnotic Dirge Records)

Hypnotic Dirge Records’ first release of 2020 will be the second full-length album from Kassad, entitled London Orbital, due for release on January 10th 2020.

Kassad’s 2017 album “Faces Turn Away” explored themes of misery and claustrophobia in an urban setting. The new record “London Orbital” continues with this theme.

London Orbital centers around modern urban living and looks to a near future of megacities where the city itself is a personified, malevolent being where human empathy and culture have been replaced by artificial intelligence. The artist adds:

I wanted to create music for an imagined, future London – one where the city’s monoliths of glass and concrete have come alive to assert their malevolent control over the millions of people that live and toil amongst them. Workers travel in the vast shadows of these buildings, in the tunnels and transport systems that snake below or in the briefest snatches of sun that are yet to be blacked out. If you tilt your head and look at the city just right, you can already see the light starting to turn to darkness.

Creating a concept is one thing but making that concept come to life is another. Can the listener understand and be immersed in what the band/artist is trying to get across? Kassad’s creation, London Orbital has an incredible concept and across five unique but equally story telling tracks, it shines through. Like a ray of sunshine desperately trying to break through the darkness of the world.

Deliciously cold, delectably dark, divinely twisted, this is an album of bleak blackness that haunts the memory long after it has ended. Hopelessness is what Kassad creates on London Orbital, a constant feeling of never ending gloom and unhappiness. Any moments of light and levity just highlight the immense hail of darkness. This is an album where the word immersive is not just a good word to describe the album but rather the state of mind that most will have while listening to it.

Musically, London Orbital is a post black metal album, one that delivers the melodic beauties one expects from post-style music. As well as the savagery often associated with the heavier side of things. Vocals are few and far between, when they do crop up they are background and howl like the wind. Everything over-powering them but it working perfectly, the depressive melodies and fiery drums often doing all the work.

It’s an exciting and intriguing listen, one where the horrid dystopian future it implies feels all too real.

Kassad – London Orbital Full Track Listing:

1. The Boundary
2. The Concrete
3. The Hope
4. The Hopeless
5. The Hollow

Links

Pre-order | Bandcamp