The Music
The Words
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The priest is actually a huge Oranssi Pazuzu fan. The rabbi is wearing a Thy Catafalque shirt. The minister was blasting Neurosis in his car when he pulled up. The bar is actually a jazz club. There’s a swing band playing.
That’s as far as I feel like pushing the ridiculous setup, but here’s the punchline: Entropia‘s शूत्य स्थान (Shoony sthaan) / Vacuum is psychedelic blackened sludge metal with a twist—not a gimmick, mind you, but a genuinely innovative component that they totally own and integrate wholly into their aesthetic without missing a beat. That twist is, in short, swing and shuffle drumming. The band leverages this simple conceit into a dizzying array of endlessly fascinating, peerless compositions.
When you read the words “metal” and “swing” in the same paragraph, your brain might have pinged you with a thought of Diablo Swing Orchestra. Delete that mental notification, because that’s leagues away from what’s going on here. Vacuum‘s opening track, “Poison”, begins with several minutes of ominous, fairly straightforward atmospheric sludge, with a subtle eighth-note swing feel that only hints at where things are headed. Triplet double bass and, later, blast beats suggest that the true underlying time signature is actually \(\frac{3}{4}\) (or \(\frac{6}{8}\)) rather than swung \(\frac{4}{4}\). But at 2:45, the album’s true character is unveiled: a full-blown sixteenth swing beat with pounding kick drum, a hi-hat shuffle, a repetitive guitar motif, and a sinister synth pulse accenting the downbeats. This almost knocked me out of my chair. The commitment to patient repetition and slow building of this dark theme invites the Oranssi Pazuzu comparison I opened with, but they would never dare frame their metallic musings in such an unorthodox context. Several minutes pass and “Poison” sheds its shuffle for a driving, early-Mastodonlike sludge chorus, but the psychedelic groove returns with force, adding chaotic layers of flesh onto the skeleton they built the first time around. If you are familiar with the band’s previous albums, the seeds of psychedelia were sown but not blossoming; here, they bud and pollenate fruitfully, with wide-open song structures allowing them room to breathe and swirl and dance airily. I mean, this passage just goes on and on, drowning the listener in its acidic chaos. Mercifully, the band pulls us out of the water only to punch us in the face with a vicious blackened sludge climax out of the Inter Arma playbook; the drumming vacillates from triplet double bass to non-swung sixteenth double bass to triplet blasts to a variation of the sixteenth swing beat found in the long psychedelic passages. They combine all their as-yet-revealed tricks on the table in this majestic culmination of fifteen surreal minutes, and yet they’re only getting started.
I won’t attempt to describe the rest of this record in detail, but there is so much more to it. It never strays far from the style it establishes on the opener, continuing to weave new tapestries from those same threads, with an occasional new element tossed in (like a very unique galloping blast beat in the title track, and a Mesarthimesque lilting keyboard melody on “Hollow”). Vocals are sparse and often reserved for one brief appearance late in a track, similar to some of Cult of Luna‘s works. The drummer has complete command of his metal chops, tastefully deploying multiple types of blast beats with mechanical precision yet never sounding machinelike, retaining the human feel even at his most intense.
There is so much to love and appreciate about what Entropia has achieved here. Even before considering the swing-based percussion and liberal application of electronic soundscapes, it is worth highlighting the pitch-perfect synthesis of stoner-sludge riffs with black metal, a rare feat in and of itself. The fact that Entropia doesn’t stop there, but just uses that as the canvas for their masterpiece, is beyond commendable. Vacuum pushes Entropia into the highest rank of the psych-black pantheon, alongside bands like Oranssi Pazuzu, Wormlust, and Skáphe—but even listing them alongside those bands feels disrespectful to the singular vision and execution of this album. It is, as I said above, peerless. This album earns its own genre tag and stands by itself in a pantheon all its own.
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