Label: Cold Spring
Release date: March 21, 2025
Words by Greg Walker
When I first saw this was a real thing, I was deadset keen to sit back and digest, but it pains me to say this split release by extreme music legends Iggor Cavalera and Shane Embury falls well short of expectations. These two names are collectively responsible for some of the classic pioneering albums of Death, Thrash, and Grindcore via pillars of metal such as Sepultura, Napalm Death, Brujeria, Lock Up, Venomous Concept, Nailbomb, Cavalera Conspiracy, Meathook Seed, amongst others. Often at the forefront of their respective scenes’ innovation and pushing of extremities, the combination of Iggor and Embury conjures all sorts of possibilities given their musical capabilities.
Alas, this fails to deliver, in all aspects, by a long way.
At once entirely nonresonant, Iggor’s 19:44 min track Neon Gods is not flashy or hooky in any way whatsoever; at the risk of sounding like my father, it’s literally noise for noise’s sake. Throughout the first ten minutes electronic sounds conjure images of flocks of swallows chirping in a startled frenzy, a cacophony which was annoyingly overpowering as it morphed into an engulfing biblical locust swarm, which in turn morphs into what reminded me of the unearthly twittering of the aliens in the movie Independence Day. The din twists to a muffle like we’re underwater, only to break the surface for air to be confronted with a sandstorm of the combined mentioned factors. All the while, an ominous drone looms in the background, like a big God behind the Revelations.
Thinking it’s all over, I realised I was only halfway through, and a sigh escaped me. Now within a calmer but no less intense dirge, a tortured cry circles an aural vortex, a redundant reminder that we’re in some sort of doomy hell. Well before this I’d come to accept this is not simply an insertion of electronica into what you’d expect from someone with Iggor’s pedigree. There is nothing remotely musical here, no clever inclusion of samples or electronic pomp amongst punk bombast like the seamless Nailbomb that Iggor contributed to. It’s altogether confusing and quite frankly absurdly self-indulgent to the point someone should’ve said “STOP!” very early on.
It’s an agonising beneath-the-skin itch, unabating through to the distorted and manipulated lyric from Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence stuttering “And the people bowed and prayed to the neon gods they made”. The Bandcamp bio uses phrases like “dystopian fever dream…sonic nightmare…industrial noise…” to describe this track, and in that much I guess they’re on the money.
Shane Embury’s offering Own Your Darkness is equally vainglorious; driven along by the same ominous subterranean drone, it is overall not nearly as vexatious as Neon Gods. The overwhelming redeeming feature I got out of Embury’s track is that it runs for 6 minutes less than its predecessor.
Swaying back and forth in the earphones left to right and back again, the ongoing rhythmic swelling is much less intolerable than Neon Gods, but to me, Own Your Darkness is nothing more than the soundtrack to a drawn-out cryosleep scene in some sort of sci-fi isolation thriller movie. Release date is March 21, and I’m assuming it’s a cruel coincidence that Friday is World Harmony Day, ironic considering the utter dissonance in this work. I’m not going to insult the vision of the artists or the computer skills involved in constructing this; I’m usually acutely aware of the time and toil that goes into creating music, even if I find it unpalatable. So having said that, there’s certainly a point to all this, but the end result is lost on myself.
If this were the first time I’d been confronted with any work by either Iggor Cavalera or Shane Embury, I would actively avoid any other release with their names attached. If there is any genius involved here, it lays in the method by which both artists manage to keep their discordance doggedly rolling throughout the bloated track times, although there is some merit in how they’ve harnessed an organic feel to how their respective journeys morph and grow and die and rebirth. But I’m definitely left thinking if this was released in the era of lucrative record sales, would Neon Gods/Own Your Darkness have been interpreted as an inside practical joke on the industry?
