Band:	Mgła
Album:	Exercises In Futility
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	September 04, 2015
Guest review by:	Alina Zia

01. Exercises In Futility I
02. Exercises In Futility II
03. Exercises In Futility III
04. Exercises In Futility IV
05. Exercises In Futility V
06. Exercises In Futility VI

Exercises In Futility is purportedly Mgła's nonpareil album and has been dithyrambically eulogized. It has accresced the adulation of black metal's habitués over the years.

Marked by acerbic yet atrabilious tremolo-picked riffs morphing to egregiously repetitive mediocrity in concinnity with the arguteness and fervidity of ride cymbals and Mikołaj's dour monotonic execution of vocals limning the profundity of an exquisite agony, Exercises In Futility reaches its apogee with the nascent insurgency of diaphanous hope and cauterized distantiation in "Exercises In Futility IV" suffused with poignant melodic fluidity without veering into schmaltzy saccharinity.

Adumbrating the delitescent verity of any extant truth other than its own absence, the lyrics meticulously encapsulate a pervading feeling of atrabiliousness and precipitate a sense of inwardness over the incommensurability of grief and the insuperable vagaries of life. Extolled as limpid yet recherché and sibylline, the lyrics have profound expressivity that transcends the previous argosy of albums. The caliginous confinements sentineling the susurrous velleity of blissful insouciance, dim with the last vestiges of crepuscular light in the pulchritude of sorrow, bereft of the ochroleucous effulgence of warm aureate light that permeates the empyreal cerulean. This compounding pain is only fugacious as is our temporal existence.

Despite Mgła's fulgurant popularity, Exercises In Futility is not an album of eximious virtuosity. The recurring monochromatic tessellations of tremolo picks with a repetitiveness that is so soporific that it becomes execrable to the point of stagnancy and somniferous redundancy extenuates the effectuality of the culminating tunefulness of a multi-layered dissonance in an imbroglio of polysemic uncertainty and tumescent dubiety cathected with a philosophical trenchancy, rather than reinforcing it. Mgła self-avowedly advocate cynical nihilism expounding upon the arbitrariness of human existence, hence the intense emotionalism exuded by their lapidary lyrics. I do not impugn Mgła's lyrical prowess rather their deigning to be monochromatic which is why I feel Exercises In Futility is not unfailingly engaging. I wouldn't go so far as to panegyrize a work also afflicted by tessellated vapidities.

The intermittent and judicious use of inverted bell splash, ride, and crash cymbals creates the desired effect by acting as a mode to control and veer the sombre, umbrageous atmosphere of songs rather than serve as meretricious embellishments. The clangor of the bell and bow of ride cymbal and spurtive clashes at a china cymbal, perforated with holes to augment volume and trashiness, are rendered with exactitude. Exercises In Futility closes with multiple fervid strikes at the inverted bell splash cymbal, and the bow and junction of the bell and bow of the ride cymbal on either side of the dome. The effect of cymbals and arpeggiating chords creating melody to accentuate the plaintiveness is vitiated by the inordinate repetition and paucity of piquant vacillations of riffs. The drumming is not exceptional; Maciej's strikes are fast and well-placed, but do not hit the snare drum and toms with sufficient cudgeling force. "Exercises In Futility II" showcases a recurring drum beat with a simultaneous strike at the second hanging tom and a floor tom before clashing the china cymbal. But most of the drumming on Exercises In Futility is banal, with the regular single or double beat at the snare drum and hi-hats.

The drums and cymbals do not reach the optimum level of audibility in the mix, the guitars preponderating over their sound, obfuscating the clangorous percussion. The double bass drums are not very audible. The sharp, distinct pinging sound of an inverted bell splash cymbal on "Exercises In Futility V" percolates through, but other subtle nuances are almost undetectable as the percussion is a bit subdued in the mix. Even the tenuous clank of splash cymbal accompanying the argute pinging of an inverted bell splash cymbal and the sonorous, metallic overtones of crashes are clearly audible on Age Of Excuse, the vibrations emanating from the rim dissipating in the background, a smoother, more pellucid cymbal sound without an inordinately amplified pitch or slow decay. Riffs, interposed between sections of graininess and clanks of rides and inverted bell splashes, are refined without being over-polished while still retaining the stark, unvarnished abrasiveness of previous albums. Vivified by its invigorating dynamism, Age Of Excuse is a seamless convergence of coherent, virtuosic guitars imbricating over one another with a virile dexterity that is not overvigorous, dispensing with dissonant exuberance. The lugubriosity of the lead-in track weighs it down ponderously with an unrelenting umbrage that extricates the listener from the sempiternity of forlorn inner musings and disencumbers from existential incertitude through a theurgical melody.

There is an exigent need to dispense with banal repetitive song structures in the black metal milieu. Though all albums evince some similitudes, interfused with a tonality strongly colored by astringent dissonances, one cannot deny the dynamic exigency met by fulgurous coruscating passages on Age Of Excuse which incorporates riffs with more vacillatory transitions endowing the listener with albescent numinosity.