Band:	Thantifaxath
Album:	Hive Mind Narcosis
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	June 02, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Solar Witch
02. Surgical Utopian Love
03. The Lost Wisdom Of Wolves
04. Burning Kingdom Of Now
05. Hungry Ghosts
06. Blissful Self Disassembly
07. Mind Of The Sun

What would it sound like if Mahavishnu Orchestra played black metal?

I'm not sure why it seems like black metal is one of the genres where innovation tends to converge, and maybe a lot of it is because I'm biased towards black metal and I tend to give it more dues for whenever it does innovate. But I have yet to hear dissonant power metal with uncommon time signatures. And sure, that's one avenue of innovation and it's not like playing around with those specific musical aspects hasn't already been done since the 60s and 70s, specifically by acts that do come to mind whenever I listen to Hive Mind Narcosis. So just approaching music with more dissonance and uncommon rhythms is nice but it's not really enough to really be avant-garde, especially not after a decade or more in which every band tried to follow in Deathspell Omega's dissonant black metal footsteps.

Canada's Thantifaxath especially are a band that, while sounding reminiscent of some of the big players in dissonant black metal, still managed to carve a niche of progressive and atmospheric black metal. Their three releases from 2011 to 2017, two EPs and one album, each evenly spaced out by three year gaps, cemented their place as a very interesting band to look forward to, but they haven't really became a commonplace name in the genre, quite unfairly so. Now, with twice as large of a gap between releases, we have a return, something that takes the more classical elements showing up in Void Masquerading as Matter to something that feels more akin to the jazz prog rock of the 70s with its quirky elements, but in a black metal context.

There isn't that much that Thantifaxath do different from the likes of Dodecahedron, but there's a very uncanny feeling in the dissonance that feels closer to the way Emptiness approach it, but even that feels like an incomplete comparison because of how meticulous Thantifaxath are at integrating that in an sound that feels equally weird and straight-forward. "Meticulous" is an important word here, because just putting bits of death and doom in your metal, and making it prog and injecting ambient is all fun, but keeping it from being disjointed is a mighty task. It's wrong enough to feel wrong, but cleverly arranged in harmony to keep it from being a mess. It's not suffocating, it's not mind bending, it's not out of reach, but it is bold nonetheless.

And with how the album is conceptually tied to contradictions, I end this review with a quote from First Reformed: "Courage is the solution to despair, reason provides no answers. I can't know what the future will bring; we have to choose despite uncertainty. Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously, Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself."