Gnod – Chapel Perilous

Rocket

Drawing its title from the concept popularised in Robert Anton Wilson‘s Illuminati-series novel The Cosmic Trigger, Gnod‘s Chapel Perilous embarks on a hepped-up journey through the outer and inner spaces of the mind, here expressed through the medium of guitars and other instruments rammed through amplification turned up to at least 23.

So if this album is intended to act as either a psychological voyage of self-discovery or as an Arthurian quest for occult enlightenment (delete / select as applicable), it also allows for some punishing riffology and mind-melting sonics along the way. It’s telling that both “Donovan’s Daughters” and “Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down” have been the centrepieces of the band’s recent touring set list, blistering and brawling as they are, both polished and captured with a raw energy that bristles at the edges.

The former occupies a similar angular territory to This Heat at their most explosive. It’s entirely easy to become lost in the repeated guitar strum and cycling percussive clang, everything flickering off dubwise style in repeated echo trails and shuddering bass that has an almost physical presence at the obligatory loud volume. The slipstreamed vocals eventually become so buried in the cacophony that it becomes a task to even identify them as words, and this sense of being swept up pell-mell in the whirlwind is part of the ritual that Gnod evoke here — the feeling of letting go, the complete immersion in ecstatic noise that subsumes everything else until its very connection to reality becomes tenuous.

“Uncle Frank” in particular has all the weighty presence of being shoved bodily into a turning concrete mixer, and it’s pertinent while listening to Chapel Perilous to recall that Gnod joined FaUSt onstage in Manchester in December 2017 to spectacularly heavy effect. The two bands share a similar affinity for the relentless, for taking things further than might sometimes seem sensible from the outside, and this LP reveals itself to have a higher purpose once fully submerged within its roiling, churning onslaught. Here, guitar, bass drums and effects are instruments of transition and translation, alchemically altering the perception of time, folding in and expanding at the same time.

The centre triptych of “Europa”, “Voice From Nowhere” and “A Body” focus more on the rhythmic elements that construct the monolithic wall of sound, heaving with vocal samples, post-industrial percussion (of the metal-bashing and huge drum-thumping variety). Fed-back textural plunges delve into the delay-effected wormholes that lead from one state of mind into another, the heave and hurl of slow-motion decay and rebirth dripping and oozing across the acoustic spectrum. Intriguingly, these tracks are not at their best when listened to on headphones, as might usually be expected; at least not the sort worn while in public. Instead, there is a mass to them that benefits from shifting larger volumes of air, of filling exterior space as well as inside the head and feeling the furnishings and windows respond to the vibrations.

Listening to Gnod is always something of an all-or-nothing ritualistic experience, but Chapel Perilous takes them one step closer on the initiate’s path to the sublime.

-Linus Tossio-