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Obsidian Wreath

by Infant Island

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GeN2Mo
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GeN2Mo Running you over with immense force. But also with enough emough emotional variation and depth that it actually manages to maintain evocative traction instead of running flat after the first impact. A rare achievemnt. (Yes, this is an extremely unconfortable tire-analogy and I am mostly not sorry)
alliterationn
alliterationn thumbnail
alliterationn this is as epic as it is pummeling. its like having your emotions balled up into a fist and using them to bash your head in, only stopping momentarily at times to embrace you. Favorite track: Veil.
nordani
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nordani I'm just gonna say it: This album's gonna be on BrooklynVegan's 2024 list of best screamo records.
Jarrad Robb
Jarrad Robb thumbnail
Jarrad Robb An excellent and impassioned reach for the ecstatic, providing needed emotional context for the fucked times we live in. I
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1.
[Daniel:] Imprisoned several thousand years I have awaited you, oh obsidian seer. Palm of iniquity a reliquary withstands my sincere welcoming of a voiceless despair. Voidless, yet flourishing. Voidless, a life contrived. Voiceless, yet alive in the end. Voiceless. A part of another cycle. It stills the air and swallows control. It conquers the worst in us and ensnares our souls and so we exist without question. Living amongst those cradled to necessary fate. I suppose this is the end. Within our eyes, your will a part of me, my favor undying for you. [Shorts:] Rot in dampened neath. Gaze upon the gloam as it drips: festering, forgotten.
2.
Fulfilled 01:36
[Daniel:] All to share a gaze upon a window for which there’s no luxury of safety, nor opportunity, nor hope, which you seldom sell me. To relinquish our dreams under the guise of a lucky lottery – how could you spare to inconvenience your comfort? Could I afford the fear someday? Could I retain the hope of a false sense? Are we to swallow a golden dream? They peer down upon us with privileged scrutiny. Eaten alive Reviving an ageless lie Eaten alive An eye for a mind Eaten Alive Reviving an ageless lie Eaten alive An eye for a mind A soul for your time To forget that which we are bled. To descend, how perfect, we the dead deliver all our presence. [Daniel & Kyle:] I will collapse and never be – and your will so charitably given, a life portrayed, displayed inside a shell which you will never free.
3.
Found Hand 02:15
[Alex:] Bound at the wrists, stung by the rope, agency stripped, absent of hope. This empty world, this empty life, this hole of a body is empty inside. Broken and bowed under the weight. Gutted and owed: all futures erased. My hands removed, bloodied and maimed. [All:] Our hands...
4.
[Daniel:] A part of every living thing that claws from its caged love dwells its incessancy. I will forever become the raging water. Pummeling mesmer as you try and seep through suffering as if there’s an escape: cognition or real reason. Truth be told all lividity beholds finality, wreathed into momentary amethyst. I will not, I will not, I will not contend your hive of apathy, as your sky comes crumbling down upon ages. Stumbling upon your own life untaken, release me from your broken dream: obsolete in everything. Surfacing exposure rages over you. Surfacing exposure, my rage over you who refuses every tide to turn the hand. My worth to grovel at a throne of grandeur. Release me. Lifeless value served under fate. I choose to fiddle truth, that some stoic mirror you feel resembles a life wanted. Lacking a final cure for you to change.
5.
Veil 04:52
[Daniel:] Witness across the board 'til it may unravel. All thoughts of decaying oneself, always still awake. I hear them less, upon cresting waves sunken to bottomless depth. So do you return? The fear swelling in your lungs, our most cherished memories are lost in dark cavernous futures. And I shall choose to retain my own light to decide, oh, to decide what little warmth of this shade I desire. And I choose to face this, stripping off our masks, and yet, faceless? Strange and inevitable. Some part of this is familiar, some sort of natural disaster all too serene to see... Do you share any part of anything? Does it help to stare into your void of misery? Rejecting what you cannot change. Eating away at your own dreams til you shed every part of you. Til you count your endless steps, all of which that you refuse still, always a face of disbelief, always continuous, always incomplete. And my eyes wander upon the skin that crawls with every pointless feeling of indefinite sorrow, drowning in my own fear, or welcoming it, I wish but I cannot save you, within these moments sheltering ourselves from misery. [All:] All darkness, all blood; all cynics, for what? This world is enough.
6.
Amaranthine 04:15
[Daniel:] Eternity weaved over your lavender grave, like sunlight plagued upon a closed door. Washed over every fold, nook, and corner of this earth resides a part of you. My dream was to live in a circle of this, night or dawn, pain or bliss. I could bare none of it, and I could despair, but I could bare none of it. Yet the vine keeps growing, flowering with little light or water, it creeps into my bones: amaranthine, composed of torture, embedded to blossom alone. Yet alive like sunlight, nonetheless.
7.
With Shadow 03:50
[Daniel:] Talk lively, one who aches. With shadow, impassible. As your walls hold & hang, all fearful merits. And with you, they will crumble, tall. Scripted, one, by an altering contract. Your grasp held, with everything that tunnels up, and every day you sink in your hell. I walk by all dead endings – will reduce your stain of certainty and judgment, strain my vision to filter, yours perishing. I feel and strew every corner of you, like shifting one foot all too soon, and all tunnels. My hollow dooms with a bleak hope. Your shadow devours you. So, further, a creature shall crave to only become like marrow you feed upon. Withholding all of us from every crevice of salvation I ache towards it, to only dig into yours. Dig deeper and deeper into my skin. Will you see? Will you dig deeper and deeper into our skin. Only to find?
8.
Unrelenting 02:38
[Daniel:] Your flames rain bright vermilion dancing against this frigid obsidian. And I choose to challenge what little hope you have. An echoing decay of a last stand, it comes, and molds itself over our bones. With no shelter to sustain, it smothers you and then it stays there, harboring fear. Til the last drop, leering, just like a fly; cold, collecting, controlling a tide of despair. Leering, just as it lies, a burning ember dormant, it chooses to rage. Unrelenting, igniting everything, it consumes. You feign and recoil your hate towards a pool of suffering. Our burning embers pressed against our chests. Our burning embers raging against you.
9.
Kindling 04:02
[Harper & Logan:] It's a star-soaked ladder, Two beating hearts. It's a dagger rising in the dark. I've been watching ships go under. Cold fingers drag the captain down. Transfixed by violent thunder. The hand of God can't save them now. It's a blood-stained letter. It's a siren's song. It's a love that shines before it's gone. I was walking the river facing the water treatment derelict, like a man on death's watch pacing, searching for signs of passing ships. [Daniel:] Feeding through one lifespan to hold your suffering. Swoon only to succumb to fearing. I know not what lies ahead within the dark of night. Signals lying distant among an endless horizon. Kindling our lonely fires, we nurture our frozen dreams.
10.
Vestygian 06:57
[Daniel:] Breaking through, into the screen for nothing to conclude. It lasts, and so? Unloving, I chose to oppose. Though you claim us, unchained and free? Yet here I stand, everlasting and loving. While here I suppose, wilted and given while these hands tremble, I’ll search and find, your miracle [Alex & Kyle:] Blinding light – is it the end? Or a tunnel? Endless blight – Is it endurance? Are we helpless? [Daniel:] Yet – dare I choose to accept? It’s dust in my dreams, remarking how a moment’s breath drifts off without the wind. And so the darkness crept up, to rest beside our cursed heads. And so you spill your dreadfulness, dwindling from within. How do you choose to burn so bright? How do you kindle a warmer future? A warm bright light enclosed Shade of myself indisposed So I shall fade or rage Nurtured within your cage No escaping All along, I was you Watching I burn In the dying of light I burn blinding And how do you live with such malice? Suffered and calloused In the dying of light, I burn Blinding what you choose to see A different understanding Seared within a dream I was your rage Watchful from afar

about

Fury in mourning. This is the emotional world in which Infant Island’s third album, Obsidian Wreath, wraps itself and its listener. It is an album about trudging through the end of the world: where climate catastrophe, the acceleration of capitalist extractive exploitation, the apathy towards social health which has emerged from recent mass death, and an endless stream of other ongoing crises too numerable to be named, constantly haunt the edges of our vision, like a rot that sets in on the borders of being. Obsidian Wreath is an album about the hopelessness of the slow violent decay of the world, about reckoning with a totalizing, impossible condition of reality which never stops confronting you with the question: how do we continue?

This is the question which Infant Island contends with throughout this record, a question they meet with fervor, with ferocity, with a determination and clarity marked – sustained, even – by grief. Lyrically, musically, the album shifts between light and darkness, using such tropes and their accompanying affects not in their cliché forms as opposing forces, but as mutually determined states of being which implicate and deterritorialize the Other. There must be something beautiful that can emerge from something terrible – this kind of impossible hope, an optimism that only emerges only from the condition of absolute pessimism, guides the album’s thematic considerations. Perhaps this impossible faith has something to do with how Obsidian Wreath has come into existence – being written in 2020 but releasing in 2024, the record’s slow birth reflects a force of will which was required to survive a global event which threatened the music industry and the people in it at every level.

This contradictory pessimistic optimism is realized as well in Infant Island’s singular songwriting, which filters Virginia screamo through the melancholic furor of American Black Metal acts like Panopticon and Deafheaven. Obsidian Wreath continues and advances the band’s masterful weaving of heavy genres, combining screamo and black metal with a deft movement between the sweeping emotionality of shoegazing post-metal, the hard-hitting grooviness of new-school grindcore, and the searing feedback of noise rock. Each composition flows seamlessly into the next, making this fluidity of sound feel not like an oscillation between styles, but instead like the tracing of the contours of a scene, as though Infant Island are tracing their own artistic singularity through the historicity and creative multiplicity of American extreme metal. One cannot shake the feeling that this is music born from a desire for community – where we are accompanied through this world not only by our friends and family but by the ghosts, the historical presences we feel but remain forever out of sight, that we unwittingly follow every day. Produced again by Virginia legend Matthew Michel (Majority Rule, Nø Man); with guest spots from Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval (Greet Death) on “Kindling,” Andrew Schwartz (.gif from god) on “Another Cycle”; and with contributions from members of Undeath, King Yosef, For Your Health, Senza, Malevich, Mikau, and more – one can’t help but feel that sense of community. Infant Island invites you into a scene, welcoming despite all its aesthetic harshness.

In this way, Obsidian Wreath is the kind of heavy music that would feel most proper to hear shuddering through the red clay bricks of rural Virginia, its place of birth. It is music that carries in its melodic intensity the materiality and contradictions of its Southern home, so geographically near, yet so culturally and economically far from the centers of American hegemonic power. The album art, from Virginian folk artist Sarah Bachman, captures this social rootedness, contrasting the ethereality of an Appalachian night with the chaotic obliterating power of a wildfire. Silhouetted figures, between ash and shadow, are imprinted on the ground, absently present, ghosts which cling to the land and to each other. Bachman’s art expertly captures the political and emotional stakes of Infant Island’s songwriting: a refusal to let go of this world.

Obsidian Wreath is the culmination of Infant Island’s entire discography, synthesized into one LP and turned up to 11. As begun with 2020’s Beneath and Sepulcher, four years later it continues the band’s artistic direction to darker, harsher moods and sounds while also putting them in contrast with their most delicate and experimental Infant Island arrangements to date. It is a relentless, furious, and ever-shifting composition which coheres around expert composition and a single-minded interrogation of how we can possibly continue living in the state of this planet. In “Veil” at the midpoint of the record, all members of Infant Island, as well as many guests, chant together in unison to insist that “this world is enough.” Standing in community, Infant Island insists not that the conditions of the world in which we live are adequate. No, they insist that this world contains within it already what is needed to transform it into something better and freer, something which will sustain the lives we cling to.

credits

released January 12, 2024

Infant Island on this release is:
Daniel Kost – vocals, lyrics
Alexander Rudenshiold – guitar, vocals, lyrics
Winston Givler – guitar, vocals
Kyle Guerra – bass, vocals
Austin O’Rourke – drums, percussion, piano, cello, accordion, mandolin, vocals, orchestral arrangement, production for "Found Hand"

Additional performances:
Andrew "Shorts" Schwartz – vocals ("Another Cycle," "Clawing, Still"), lyrics ("Another Cycle")
Harper Boyhtari – vocals and lyrics ("Kindling")
Logan Gaval – vocals ("Kindling")
Gang vocals on "Veil" performed by all members of Infant Island, Malevich (Josh McIntyre, Sasha Schilbrack-Cole, Daniel DeSimone, and Connor Ray), and Mikau (Adam Stergis and John Irby); Alexander Jones (Undeath); King Yosef; Hellena Christensen (Senza, Tolls, Southtowne Lanes); Rosa Delgado (For Your Health, Clavel); Andrew "Shorts" Schwartz (.gif from god); and Meghan Harris (Watchdogs).
Orchestral arrangements performed by the Faceless Ensemble.

Technical credits:
Primarily engineered and recorded at Ivakota Recording on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and Viva Studio in Fairfax, VA by Matthew Michel in January and February 2021.
Additional vocals engineered and recorded by Kyle Guerra in Spotsylvania, VA at Hidden Sound Studios.
Overdubs engineered and recorded by Austin O'Rourke in Alexandria, VA and Arlington, VA.
Mixed by Matthew Michel at Viva Studio.
Mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege in Portland, OR.

Artistic credits:
Art by Sarah Bachman.
Layout by Alexander Rudenshiold.
Logo by Austin O'Rourke.
Album copy written by Justin Keever.

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