BAND OF THE WEEK: Onirophagus
Death/doooooom. Heavy as two really heavy things.
If you’re in a position where you get to listen to a lot (and I really do mean a lot) of music of a certain genre, wide and vague as it might be, you end up developing a certain sense of triage. I know it sounds unfair, but there’s really no way to deal with these 2.473 (not a made up number) unopened promos that I’ve had in my inbox at one point unless you start making some pre-listening decisions. And no matter how esoteric it might sound, some bands just look right at a certain point in time. I used “look” but it’s not necessarily a visual thing, it’s a combination of a number of both tangible and intangible factors. Take Onirophagus, for instance - they’re a good example because they’ve been around for a while, and they might or might not have fulfilled this shifting criteria before, throughout their fifteen year existence. But now, when they got in touch, they immediately felt right. Was it the cool cover artwork for their new album, courtesy of the great Paolo Girardi? Was it the fact they got the equally great Jaime Gomez Arellano to master the thing? Was it the quality of the press photos? The fact they came as a recommendation from a colleague with great taste? The fact they have a song called ‘Landsickness’ which sent me on a little tangent rabbit hole about the medical condition? Did my brain establish a linguistic connection because I’ve been totally addicted to the awesome/hilarious The Dream Eaters? Dude, I don’t know. Maybe it was all of it, maybe only the gods of metal will ever know. Fact is they got to the stage of “will listen”, and fortunately they totally have the goods to back up the mystical decision once you actually play ‘Revelations From The Void’.
It’s in fact pretty easy to get drawn into the excellence of this, the Catalonian band’s third album. A quick perusal of their previous records ‘Prehuman’ (2013) and ‘Endarkenment (Illumination Through Putrefaction)’ (2019) will reveal an interesting amount of potential, but after what themselves call a “rebirth” of the band, with a significant lineup shift, in 2021, this really seems like the decisive extra step kind of moment. Exploring a wide part of the doom/death spectrum, they can go from Incantation-esque death metal parts, with a very pleasant mid-tempo sort of crunch, to old My Dying Bride-ian mournful doom (‘The Tome’ is extraordinary in that regard), always displaying a whale-thick amount of density but never boring, never going through the motions. There’s always a hook somewhere, whether it’s through the riff, the chug, the beat, the varied and frankly impressive vocal performance by Eduardo “Paingrinder”, there’s always something to ground you and keep you excited about what’s going on. Even if it’s a little outside the box part that hints at black metal tremolo-picking, or even some surprising clean vocals here and there. It’s not because you play death/doom that you can’t flirt with the other genres, you see.
And yeah, kudos to Javi Feléz at Moontower Studios and Gomez’ typically supreme mastering work for making them sound just perfect, with a mathematically precise amount of grit and warmth. You know how you (if you’re anything like me) always imagine your favourite death metal and related bands playing in a damp cave with the acoustics just right? That’s exactly how ‘Revelations From The Void’ sounds. They also leave the best for last, pulling out all the stops and playing all their cards on the epic closer ‘Stargazing Into The Void’, which not only sounds exactly like what its title inspires, but also like all the other bands I’ve mentioned on this text doing a full-on collaboration song. Worth the price of admission on its own, really. So throw yourself into the void with no fear, but do hang around to read the cool chat we had with Mr. Paingrinder himself down there, okay?
‘Revelations From The Void’ is out now on Personal Records.
You can find Onirophagus on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.
“Our idea when we started this project was to worship death/doom from the early ‘90s, but without imitating its formula or trying to sound like a specific band.”
— Paingrinder
So you took a little while between albums once again – but hey, it’s doom, and things are supposed to be slow, right? What can you tell us of these years in between ‘Endarkenment…’ and ‘Revelations…’, how much of it did you actually spent creating and recording this new album?
Paingrinder: It has been a coincidence that between ‘Prehuman’ and ‘Endarkenment…’ we took six years and between ‘Endarkenment…’ and ‘Revelations…’ another six. So the next one we will do the same to make the number of the beast! [laughs] We had the terrible bad luck (us and thousands of other bands) that just when we had to present ‘Endarkenment…’, the pandemic exploded. Because of that two of our members decided to leave the band amicably, so it delayed the songwriting process even more. In 2020 Obszen, also guitarist in the death metal band Bizarre, joined the band and shortly after Sir Bellum came in. Thanks to them the creative process of the album was advancing rapidly, as the core creators of Onirophagus always had a too archaic way of composing songs. They brought new technologies and the fact that they present demos recorded at home accelerates the process a lot. So the problem of taking so long between albums has been mainly due to a change of line-up. Now we are starting again, from scratch. If you take too long to give news to the world, the public forgets you or thinks you have split up. So even though we have been a band for fourteen years, ‘Revelations From The Void’ marks the beginning of a new cosmic dream-eating being.
Did you have any kind of plan for the band when you started out? Looking back on your discography and career, do you think there is anything you would have done differently?
P.: Our idea when we started this project was to worship death/doom from the early ‘90s, but without imitating its formula or trying to sound like a specific band. We had no pretensions other than having a good time at the venue and whatever came would be welcome. Perhaps the only thing I would say to the Onirophagus of the past is that we shouldn’t have ignored social media as much as we should have. We live in a society where an underground band needs to be absorbed by social media, create constant content and move your material as much as possible. If you're not there you don't exist. We have always been old school. Young metalheads who traded cassettes, read fanzines and went to record stores to see what was new, but all that has changed. Nowadays if you don't have an Instagram account to post your colorful vinyl collection you don't reach the buyers market and I think it's very sad. That's maybe the only thing we would have changed when we started our adventure with Xtreem Music, to strengthen those networks and try to go further.
Is there a particular inspiration that might have been decisive for the outcome of ‘Revelations…’, musical or otherwise?
P.: We have always tried to balance the balance between doom and death. It was something spontaneous when composing ‘Revelations…’. Obszen is an old school death metal guitarist, he's a real maniac of the old classics, while Sir Bellum is more into the ‘90s doom side of things. They have carried the compositional weight on their backs and presented it to the old founders of the band in the form of a demo. There we all decided, like cooks, if that song needed more death or more doom. We have always been inspired by the old classics, but we are real consumers of new material. We love to discover new bands that can inspire us as musicians. On ‘Revelations…’ we wanted to broaden our horizon beyond death/doom. There are many passages that can remind us of current black metal bands, epic parts that are more similar to epic doom and a vocal register that risks going out of the typical cavernous guttural. In that sense it could be said that this is our most avantgarde album, since perhaps in an accelerated part the listener thinks he will hear a death metal vocalist and instead it is a demon with a voice timbre similar to that of Tom G. Warrior.
I think the last song, ‘Stargazing Into The Void’, is fantastic, such an epic but at the same time very raw and very painful emotionally. Since it’s a longer song that stands out immediately after the first listen, is there a particular story behind it? Was it a more complex piece of music to write than usual?
P.: It is a song that consists of two parts united in one song. It was something that was already thought from the beginning of the composition of the album. We have always been faithful advocates that an album, like a movie, has to have an epic final climax, that ends and leaves the listener wanting to play it again. Like Iron Maiden ending ‘Somewhere In Time’ with ‘Alexander The Great’ or Venenum with the ‘Trance Of Death’ title-track which consists of three parts, both different styles but they have in common two albums that are masterpieces. We wanted to do the same, close in style. ‘Stargazing Into The Void’ is the denouement of a concept album that deals with a cosmic horror story but without belonging to Lovecraft or naming any of the old gods. It tells the story of an individual torn apart by an eyeless, cold and dark society, dizzy on Earth, forced to swallow his own vomit because that is supposedly the normal and established thing to do. This being finds a tome in his house, which was always there but he did not look at it with the right perspective, and it shows him the way to emptiness through an archaic formula that leads him to prepare a black brew. That will lead him to the void and that is where ‘Stargazing Into The Void’ arrives. An ending where there is nothing, no death, no stars, nothing at last.
How have you been seeing the reception people have had to the album? Is it the best reward to have after all the hard work?
P.: We have never received so much feedback. It is probably the album where we have had more reviews, appearing in countless major media such as BangerTv, No Clean Singing, etc… To this day it continues to have an impressive reception and all thanks to the work of Personal Records, which has done an incredible promotional management. Yes, we consider it a good reward, especially for an underground band that after so many years we had to start from scratch and make our way through this jungle of record labels.
I’m happy to see that you went to Gomez for the mastering, I think it really shows in the final potency of the sound. The album actually sounds amazing overall. The Girardi artwork also looks awesome. Would you like to talk a little bit about those aspects?
P.: The final result is a whole. From the recording in the Moontower Studios of our friend Javi, who was always there as producer and advising us. He was the one who gave us the idea to take it to Jaime Gomez, claiming that our work was excellent and therefore wanted Jaime to master it. Then on the other hand we have the great Paolo Girardi, who visualized our nightmarish monstrosity to perfection. A great guy, a real metalhead with whom we still keep in touch and with whom we will probably continue working in the future. Honestly we are in no man's land, and that maybe gives us more problems than joys. We are not a melodic doom band, but we are not old school rotten death metal either, and that unfortunately gives us a lot of problems. Problems when looking for a record label, because if you don't sound like an Incantation clone you have the doors closed for a hundred labels, but on the other hand if you don't sound like the nth copy of My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost, you can't get into so many other labels either. And the same with festivals, promoters, etc, we are screwed. But we do what we like, we want to try to put a little difference between so many clones or surrogates, even if it closes the doors to “success”.
I think that coming from the Spanish underground scene is starting to be a much more positive point than it was in the past – you guys seem to be in a great place right now with a bunch of fantastic bands in several styles. Even just looking at Catalonia itself, this is clear. Do you feel part of a community, in any way, and what benefits do you think you can have if that is the case?
P.: Yes, we feel we are part of a community of great bands, but because they are all bands of friends from the extreme metal scene. People we have been going to gigs with for many years. But I couldn't tell you what kind of benefits we can get from coming from the Catalan scene. As I said before, we have started from scratch and that conditions the promoters a lot because their business is to fill a concert and if they don't know your band they are not going to risk losing a cent on you. That's why it's complicated and we have reached the extreme point of having to organize the concerts ourselves, it's very sad but it's the pure reality. As for the record labels, it's exactly the same. Sometimes when they see where you come from they don't even bother to answer your mail. There are totally armored labels that only a chosen few can enter and if you don't have contacts in this fucking frivolous world, you're dead. Still, with its advantages and disadvantages, we are proud to belong to a misnamed Catalan scene.
What are your plans now for the rest of the year? May we see Onirophagus on stage, hopefully on a tour? As for new music… see you in six years for that 666 perfection?
P.: We will try to present ‘Revelations…’ live, try to get the attention of underground festivals, and if not, if no promoter bets on us, we will try to do it ourselves as far as our money goes. We already have ideas for a new album and we hope it won't be in six years, but if it is, we hope it will be because we have been touring and not because of a separation of members again. Thank you so much for having us for this interview!UGH!
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