Surachai-Embraced

For some reason that Deafheaven track has started opening musical path ways I have been unaware of or ignoring for far too long. Here I have stumbled upon the new album by Surachai and loved every minute of its three track, 34 minute glory. Surachai is the work of Surachai Sutthisasanakul, one guy who has been making experimental black metal for almost three years now. He has just released his new album Embraced, his first working with a full band to help create it, and it is aboslutly killer. The album is intense, but not overwhelming. I don't know if it's mixing or Surachai's own style, but he's not trying to bludgeon the listener with his music, but more present the music in it's own inherit intensity.

Opener "Ancestral" pretends to be a traditional black metal song, all blast beats and blurred guitar lines, along Sutthisasanakul's destroyed throat screech for vocals. Yet it doesn't take long for the experimental tendencies of Surachai to come into play. The song drops immediately suddenly into the this brief, warped, burst of industrial effects that shifts the song to a slightly more uplifting mood for the rest of the song. The ambient coda at the end of the song is one of the weirdest I've heard attached to any type of song, like a field recording of an abandoned factory littered with thousands of robotic bugs all hissing at once. "Sentinel" is more of a "pure" black metal song, but it's more meditative as well, getting all of its intensity out of the way early into the song before spending the rest of the track following the guitars down an expanding spiral of increasingly blackened despair.

Closer "Surrender" is the most experimental album on here, beginning with an eerie amount of static and dark electro-beats, before launching into the song. That tone of the intro manifests in the rest of the song, with "Surrender" having a real sense of evil to it, especially due to Sutthisasanakul dropping his vocals an octave so they sound more piercing and menacing. The song really explodes for the final of the album, it feels as if your running away from a monster that is chasing you throw a midnight forest. I am more then will to admit my inexperience in properly perceiving metal, but Embraced is an smart album, with Surachai knowing just when to incorporate something different to their already great songs that pushes it to something even better.



Links:

Surachai's Website
Buy Embraced here, from Surachi's Bandcamp