Inter Arma / Pyrrhon / Mellow Harsher
9pm / $10 advance, $12 / 21+
INTER ARMA
INTER ARMA‘s music resists generalization and categorization, but if there’s one thing that’s consistently true, it’s that the VA quintet possesses an unparalleled sense of scope. Few artists today accurately convey the complexity that INTER ARMA (Latin for “in times of war”) does – the band creates terrible and often hauntingly beautiful portraits of humanity through music that is deeply organic yet still mystical and modern. The band’s raw, uninhibited approach merges doom metal, psychedelic sludge, black metal, prog and more, and over the course of the last ten years, has established the band as a uniquely innovative force in contemporary extreme metal.
Two years after The Cavern, INTER ARMA returned last year with their heaviest and most multifaceted work to date. Paradise Gallows, their third release on Relapse, is more than an hour of lush, colorful melodies and textures blended with the heaviness of the Earth’s impending death. Like the band’s previous works, the new album is direct and foreboding while maintaining a nuanced, artful perspective. INTER ARMA‘s signature palette of dissonant high-end and abyssal low-end has been augmented with swathes of thick, impressionistic melody that lend Paradise Gallows a truly biblical sense of scale, both lyrically and in terms of the album’s sonic content. Harsh and acoustic passages (including the band’s first-ever foray into clean vocals) spar with complex rhythmic structures across nine sweeping tracks of expansive, progressive heaviness. Dense, funereal, and richly evocative, Paradise Gallows is a rich blend of doom, post-metal, sludge, and black and death metal, and is a singular and powerful new addition to the band’s already monumental discography.