Selbst - Despondency Chord Progressions (ALBUM REVIEW)
Release date: April 19th, 2024
“Despondency Chord Progressions”.
I don’t know what’s more impressive about this, whether that this is the first time since a very long time I’ve ever seen a literal description used as an album title, or that it is exactly what the Venezuelan-originated, Chile-based Selbst delivers in this full-length release.
Aptly named as such, the album is uniformly and thoroughly moody and gloomy, with an approach to instrumentation that is both dissonant and tragically beautiful. There is definitely traces of avant-garde black metal found in the album, though they are relegated to a more complementary role, in favor for a more orthodox modern black metal flavor a la Gaerea or - reasonably so given the recording lineup of this album - Aversio Humanitatis. This is made clear right from the get-go with the track “La Encarnación de Todos los Miedos” (Spanish for “The Incarnation of All Fears”), with occasions of disorienting atonality laced into a properly downcast melodic dirge.
Thematically, “Despondency…” shifts inward for intense rumination which is uncharacteristically personal for the brand of black metal Selbst plays: oftentimes, such introspection is reserved to more depressive subgenres such as DSBM, while more orthodox aesthetics tend to possess an air of metaphysical grandeur to their artistic philosophies. The darkness found in this album is a sort that just about anyone will be able to relate to: the topics of self-hatred, depression, and the helplessness of having one’s own existence coerced into a collective undoing. And, not beyond one’s expectation, the most overt showcase of these thoughts, “Third World Wretchedness” is the most jarring and despairing song out of the whole tracklist.
That said, though, the album is no mere monolith of fuming rage and hate, a surprisingly beautiful, but still equally solemn, ballad “Between Seclusion and Obsession” serves as the penultimate track: a sullen post-black metal threnody in the veins of Alcest, with touch of South American bolero, and belting heartfelt clean singing that helps air out the narrator’s sorrow.
Ultimately, while not breaking any new grounds nor exceptionally haunting, “Despondency Chord Progressions” is a wholly enjoyable album that can be vouched for as an entry point for newcomers to this blackened vein of musical genre and a solid benchmark for good black metal in the 21st century.
Because as shown time and again, one will always start at the bottom of personal misery before sinking any lower into the chaotic darkness.