Review: Violent Grief - Eulogy for the Living

Artist: Violent Grief

Album: Eulogy for the Living

Label: Crionic Mind

Release date: September 2024

Any type of music is inevitably subject to subgenrification at some point, that is, the pigeonholing of artists and their work into increasingly tiny boxes. Dark ambient is no exception - what started out as a niche subgenre of electronic music itself now comes in many guises, such as ritual ambient, space ambient, nature ambient, drone ambient etc. Being a contrarian by nature, I find it especially satisfying when an artist comes along who is impossible to neatly categorise in this fashion, and even more so if it's a new and relatively unknown (no offence intended) name. Such is the case of Violent Grief, an up-and-coming artist from Nottingham, UK, who has released four full-length albums over the past three years, and self-declares as exploring the space between noise and ambient. That description turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

There are three principal qualities that I appreciate in this release. The first is that it wastes no time in stating its artistic intent. With the album title Eulogy for the Living, a monochrome cover of dead shrub under a pale grey sky, and track titles that wouldn't look out of place on an old-school death metal album (Indictment of Birth is a particularly powerful one), this is clearly the work of someone not too fond of the current state of the world, nor of the world on the whole. However, don't mistake Violent Grief for Karjalan Sissit - the music on this album doesn't consist of violent outbursts of (self-)hateful rage; it's more of a caustic commentary made from a carefully considered position of disdain. This brings me to the second quality - this disdain is beautifully reflected in the dynamics of the album. I am always wary of projects containing noise as a descriptor, as it's not my favourite genre, but Violent Grief does an excellent job creating a flow in each track that inevitably evolves into a wall of sound without being overwhelming or drowning out all the other sonic elements, of which there are more than appears at first listen. The play between dark ambient and noise elements is really well executed here, to the point where no track (or the album as a whole) can be clearly categorised as one or the other. As the third and final quality, I have to commend how well Violent Grief seems to unite his various influences into a coherent whole; if broken down, Eulogy for the Living is a very thick soup of deep bass, field recordings, shifting drones, screeching metallic noises, synth passages, eerie organ-like sections and a lot of other ingredients that would have placed it squarely into the lap of Cold Meat Industry (RIP) at another time. And yet, despite this somewhat old-school sound that hearkens back to the early days of the genre, the production and mix are unmistakably modern.

Overall, Eulogy for the Living carves a very interesting niche for itself against the prevailing currents in contemporary dark ambient, and offers a bleak vision of the present whose sound nevertheless contains a splash of nostalgia despite itself. The only criticism that I could level against this release is that the tracks start and end somewhat abruptly, and I do believe that the artist's expression would benefit from giving individual tracks more breathing space. That said, it's a competently executed album that's enjoyable in its bleakness, and whose general sentiment is very well-timed indeed.

Rating: 8/10