Digipak. Since 2015, the mysterious Australian duo known known as Mesarthim has been on an unbroken streak of high-quality soundscapes. Much of their previous two albums and five EPs stuck to a consistent style of atmospheric black metal interspersed with electronic elements, and I'd have welcomed more of the same, but The Density Parameter has a little bit of a different flavor. Most interesting of all, however, is that The Density Parameter does not entirely abandon the medieval for the futuristic; within individual songs, focus shifts from electronics to organs and keys to harsh metal, creating a strange and beautiful tension between two eras and aesthetics. "Collapse," for example, closes with a furious blast of blackened sci-fi mayhem that comes right on the heels of a malevolent organ interlude. A couple of songs have what I'm calling "space drops": all the structural hallmarks of your typical bass drop, but the bass drops into the cosmos where there isn't an up or down so being "dropped" has less definition, and it's also more like keyboards and tremolo picking than anything else. The steady crescendos and decrescendos further balance the grim, eerie black metal with a breathing, biological structure that elicits different sounds without awkward cuts. That Summoning sound is there, full and strong; it's not as though this is without precedent for Mesarthim, and the computerized effects do dominate most of The Density Parameter, but it's nice to hear Mesarthim constructing new facets to its sound and testing the conceit of space-based atmoblack. The Density Parameter ranks among Mesarthim's best work, perhaps above it, and I'd love to hear them get even more ambitious in the future.
