bartosso
Title? There's none...
I may be repeating myself, but Mories de Jong doesn't cease to amaze me. I've already hailed him the god of madness, a prophet of misanthropy and google only knows who else. I just can't help it. Every single release from this man is a goblet of boiling individuality, messing with your reasoning, rending your heart and warping your perception of metal as one of the last thriving branches on the withering tree we call "contemporary music".
None is yet another step towards the unsettling eclecticism that has already been Cloak's hallmark since the debut album. Once again, dissonant and chaotic black metal blends seamlessly with IDM, breakcore, noise and the dark grandeur of modern classical music. Mories takes the chaos of disharmony (along with our good interval friend, "Diabolus in Musica") and combines it with soulful, unsettling and layered harmonies. In a word, Mories goes where his passion takes him, blends together seemingly incompatible elements and makes them work perfectly. As for a comparison between "None" and Cloak's previous albums... "None" is tad less sinister yet even more psychedelic, mostly due to a bigger share of noise and synth experimentation. There's also more air and polarized emotional charge in the songwriting with black metal element being less prominent.
In an interview, Mories once stated that at this stage of his life he can't see traditional composition and harmony as parts of his musical path. He chooses a different way than the one of De Magia Veterum or Deathspell Omega, though. Instead of plunging into disharmony entirely, Cloak of Altering blurs the borders between tonal and atonal, between organic and electronic, as if he wanted us to ask ourselves "Are there any rules?". Well, there are none.