October AOTM #2: Trisagion

Paul Taylor
3 days ago
3 min read

Album of the Month: Trisagion - Ethereal Shroud

The second studio album by Joseph Hawker's one-man Ethereal Shroud opens with dense ambience, a consuming sense of foreboding that masks the instrumentation in deep shadows. The intro to "Chasmal Fires" evolves slowly, from soft rainfall to delicate organ and a questioning, curious melody. But eventually it gives way, and the great raucous fury which was portended rolls in as a landslide of crisp double-bass and noisy, nigh unintelligible harsh vocals. Yet even within the rapturous aggression, the original questioning melody remains; a sad plunking tune which haunts the rest of the track, echoed in guitar rhythms and warm violins. This opening track is a treatise; it is the 27 minute thesis which defines Trisagion both stylistically and thematically.

I'll start with the song's transportive sense of melancholy, playing with funereal motifs passed between instrumentation and vocals. At over 27 minutes, the track contains multiple major melodic phrases in the form of choruses, guitar and bass leads, and multi-instrumental motifs, all of which engage and complement the rest of the instrumentation differently. Of course strong melody is not something new to Black Metal or extreme metal at large, even if it is atypical. But what I do find interesting is how Trisagion uses techniques much more familiar to the Esoteric and Shape of Despair school of funeral doom metal than those typically found in the black metal sphere.

"Chasmal Fires", and Trisagion as a whole, carries much of its melodic identity not just in stuttering solos and rasping vocals, but in long, drawn-out instrumental phrases soaring above and weaving through the tracks. For instance, a motif introduced in the opening violins of "Chasmal Fires" will find itself referenced by the rhythm guitar a scant few minutes later, only to return again as a chorus of strings near the end of the track. And in part this sort of melody recalls certain funeral doom groups due to the epic track lengths which allow memorable ideas to be reused and referenced throughout the song, not just repeated typically heard in choruses or main riffs.

Another part of Trisagion that feels informed by funeral doom are its dynamics, with slower, strongly delineated riffs common in the genre occurring with a similar frequency as the vicious tremolo riffs which define Black Metal. These more purposeful, emotionally heavy sections open the album up, providing a brief sense of clarity or a climactic swell as on the closing of "Discarnate".

Trisagion is lyrically and thematically steeped within both the worlds of RABM (Red and Anarchist Black Metal) and DSBM (Depressive Suicidal Black Metal), and informed by those scenes it is deeply anti-religious and anti-persecution, with every track taking arbitering it's own philosophy, pleading and raging against opposition. "Chasmal Fires" is the most philosophically striking, delivering vitriolic lines about the hypocrisy and brutality that religious organization entails for society.

"We cannot pretend, that the rules are the same, for the blasphemer and thе saint. [...] For the commoner and the priest."

"Chasmal Fires" takes a critical look to the concept of creationism and of an all knowing, benevolent judge. Hawker's wails express the bone-deep betrayal, the hypocrisy of morality that religion can be guilty of, declaring both love for all as well as a calling for the persecution of peoples for characteristics borne outside their control.

"To what end was I made this way, if my nature is a transgression?"

But alongside this religious confusion is a deep desperation that Hawker made his focus for his vocal performance. He intended for the intensity to come across even if the lyrics can't be made out. The album's closer does the best with these more intimately darker lyrics, because as a whole the three tracks fall further and further down the spiral of pain as the album progresses and "Astral Mariner" accordingly dwells the most intensely on despair. From its disparaging remarks against the purported upsides of a difficult life, how struggle is meant to make one stronger:

"But each scar is a weight, pulling me further, each make me sink"

To a latent and unshakable distrust in fellow man, learned from a life of rejection, backhandedness, and abuse:

"Leave me here, I'm the only one I trust, not to deepen these wounds."

Between these two themes, the dismissal of religious dominion and the furtive self-reliance, Trisagion is keen to pair it's dark melodicism with lyrics which accentuate Hawker's throat-shredding vocals into something deeply melancholic and emotive, a match for it's plodding, push-and-pull instrumentation. Trisagion is an album of both visceral aggression and delicate vulnerability. Equally blistering with it's speed and dramatizing with it's balance and dynamism. Ethereal Shroud are a project that engages with the leftist humanism of RABM and the depressive self-loathing of DSBM in tandem, and Trisagion pulls this mixture off beautifully.