Bandcamp Annihilist is chapter three. Meridian opened the story in 2021, Stasis carried it on in 2024, and this record finds the same nameless man at war with the thing that keeps dragging him back into another life. We reviewed Stasis in July last year and the architecture was the reason it worked. The question a third instalment raises is different and harder: does it stand up for somebody who walks in here first.
It does, and the reason is the two places where the band decline to hit you.
The two best moments are subtractions
“Oblivion Walker” is the shortest piece on the album at just over four minutes and the one that opens by far the widest distance between its quiet and its loud. It gets there by ending rather than climaxing, letting the arrangement thin out into a reduced passage with piano under it. Everything else here spends its last minute at full strength. This one walks away.
The title track does the other version of the same move. It sits several hundred hertz below everything around it, the darkest thing on the record, and it is the one song where the screams never arrive at all. For a band from Mechelen whose reputation is built on how hard they can hit, making your title track the one with no harsh vocals on it is a real decision, and it is the best five minutes here.
What the other five do
They are very close to each other. Across level, tonal centre and frequency balance, the remaining tracks occupy nearly the same ground, and in listening terms that means one texture: the riffs change constantly, often with real rhythmic nerve, but the frame they sit inside does not move. Stefan De Graef still carries the narrative, switching between clean lines and a throat-first scream, and Loïc Rossetti of The Ocean turns up on “Builder of Eden”, which swings hardest of the five between its ambient stretches and its fastest.
That sameness is the reservation, and it costs the record most at the end. “Everything Is Permissible” and “A Different Now” are the two least mobile tracks on the album and they close it, arriving after the title track has already made the quiet argument better. Thirty eight minutes of this band is not too much. Thirty eight minutes that finish on their flattest eleven is a shape problem, not a stamina one.
So
Recommended with that one caveat attached: this is a strong, confident record with two genuinely excellent tracks on it, and it ends in the wrong place. Restraint suits this band, and the two tracks that use it are the two worth coming back to. If you have never heard this band, start at “Oblivion Walker” and then play the title track, and you will know within ten minutes whether the other five are for you.
Seven tracks that measure remarkably alike, with two exceptions that both matter. Average level sits between -11.2 and -12.4 decibels across the album and peak-to-average distance between 11.6 and 12.7, a spread of barely a decibel over thirty eight minutes. Tonal centre runs 2007 to 2129 hertz on six of the seven. The title track breaks that at 1724 hertz with the lowest treble share on the record at 11.8 percent, which is consistent with a song carried by clean vocals rather than screams. “Oblivion Walker” breaks the other axis: twenty six decibels between its quietest and loudest passages against eleven to seventeen for everything else, and it is also the shortest track at four and a quarter minutes. The two narrowest, “A Different Now” at 11.3 and “Everything Is Permissible” at 12.3, are tracks six and seven. Nothing here has been flattened in mastering.
Standout tracks: Oblivion Walker, Annihilist, Builder of Eden
