While the rhetoric of death, evil, pain and despair is ubiquitous to the musical realm we all happily dwell in, when the opening track in a band’s album is entitled Rape, it’s not funny any more. Brace yourself for getting dragged through a more thoroughly murky underworld than usual.
Indeed, the horror emanating here is tangible, immediate, and truly uncomfortable. Like others peddling in the concentrated muck extracted from the sum of our fears, weaknesses and gluttonous urges – Khanate, Today Is The Day, Unsane, Converge – the shrieking of abomination and loss, the relentlessness of filthy riff after filthy riff is almost unbearable.
But even as it writhes and slithers out of the deepest wells of prevailing sadness, splattering rancid, toxic negativity, its backbone isn’t broken; in Indian’s case, it returns a stare into the abyss that expresses an awe beyond good and evil, an awe that is unyielding, like that of Neurosis. From All Purity is thus suspended in limbo, somewhere between depravity and martyrdom. Redemption attained via the gutter.
