BEKOR QILISH
BEKOR QILISH “The Flesh Of A New God”
By Dr. Abner Mality
For fans of metal so technical and avant-garde it will make you cross your eyes and speak Sanskrit, here is BEKOR QILISH from Italy, and wow, this is some head-scratching death metal. Some of it just annoys, but some of it is plain awesome. It’s on the I, Voidhanger label, and over there, it’s not even in the top 50% of weird stuff.
To describe the main thrust of this band, I’d say it’s like GORGUTS dissonance meeting ATHEIST complexity with additional strange touches like synth and sax solos. First two cuts ‘Defaced Background” and “Unobtainable Transformations” are twitchy, atonal, warped death with a lot of GORGUTS style dissonance. A lot to wrap your head around and frankly I had trouble with it. But with “Unearthly Dominion” things get zapped into another dimension, as it expands from angular insanity to jazzy-death that ultimately is kind of fun to listen to. If you like crazy and intense bass/drum interplay, this is for you.
Then things get really interesting with “Unaware Gods”, a spacey-sci-fi blast where synth is perfectly integrated into the metal. In fact, the synth solo here is one of my favorite parts of the album. There’s some great riffing going on here and it ends with mellow bass. “Enshrouding Wrath” continues in a similar cosmic vibe with more synth and I have to say, BEKOR QILISH uses synth in a way I haven’t heard since NOCTURNUS.
More dissonant craziness follow with “The Flesh Of Terror” but “Infinite Self-Reflecting Circles” throws everything but a hadron collider at you, including a skronky sax solo. The album ends with the brief and moody “Beggars”.
Pretentious? Yes, sir. Grating? Sometimes, for sure. Unpredictable and interesting? You better believe it.