Assumption – Absconditus (Don’t Try Too Hard Metal)
What a curious name for a metal band. I can tell you I had several assumptions about this before going into it, like it was probably black metal. Bad assumption, but it was definitely dark and depressing, which is assumed further by the doom/death tag these guys from Italy carry. Uh oh, it’s an Italian metal band again… Well, in this case I was more pleasantly surprised, perhaps too surprised, and the cover art, by the extremely slippery Finn Lauri Laaksonen, who I can assume restricts his notoriety to word-of-mouth, really gives a clear understanding of what it’s like to listen to Absconditus. The word means, essentially, “The Hidden,” which adds a further layer of meaning to this particular one. It’s rather easy to understand if one only assumes from what it presents. Just look at it again, go ahead, make an assumption.
Assumption assume practically nothing about what they’re playing, that’s what you’ll learn. Absconditus definitely has features of both doom and death, and these guys can devastate when they want to, and I assume that they want to based on what I heard, mostly. See, here’s the thing you won’t be able to assume until you listen to it. Assumption are all over the place, but only, curiously, when it comes to experimenting, such as the acoustic intro to the opener, “Liberation.” Almost immediately the listener is anticipating shoegaze due to the bizarre selection of a major/minor scale shift, but by halfway it’s slowed to doom emphysema and thanks for the cough. The problem is, the album as a whole is filled with far too many moments of clear breathing. It has a tendency to isolate the listener with its nonsensical, and poorly utilized finesse, leaving you with no perceivable exit, and this is due not to the band’s lack of power, which they have, but their lack of ability to experiment. Check out the highly questionable two-minute flute intro to “Resurgence,” which is one of the most puzzling moments of all. I had to listen to this one multiple times to really understand what was wrong with it, and it all revolves around an inability to integrate the experimental sections into the rest. By the end you feel like you’re floating in a murky void and you just want to get the hell out already.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Assumption – Absconditus
Everlasting Spew Records, Sentient Ruin Laboratories
3.7 / 5
