For a long time, the genre tags for Malevich included "grindcore" (I changed it to "screamo" right before writing this), which isn't entirely inaccurate, especially since you will see a lot of screamo bands here also using that tag, but it does set somewhat different expectations. It did set different expectations for me as well when I first added this album to my listening queue, and I liked it enough that I knew I'd have to write about it, and most of my early mental pitches for how I'd frame the review would include some Professor Utonium spilling sludge into the grindcore concoction, figuring that the grind tag must be a remnant of older releases, but the more I listened to Under A Gilded Sun and its predecessors, I realized that I couldn't really keep going with this base assumption that this is in any way a grindcore record.
See, grindcore is angry. Hardcore is angry too, but at least that's a huge umbrella term that leaves a lot more wiggle room. This despondent despair is an emotion that I more often associate with sludge metal, and with screamo (both genres that have hardcore at their roots), and it's an emotion that soaks Under A Gilded Sun. It's less about splitting hairs in regards to correct genre terminology, it's the entire emotional impact that comes as baggage with the tag you place on an album. This is an album of intense emotional impact, and I'd argue that that is its most defining quality rather than the admittedly interesting mix of genres.
Even "screamo" might send the wrong message. I've covered a lot of very emotional screamo records, but the way they achieved that emotion was through sheer chaotic intensity, and Under A Gilded Sun instead does that with a heaviness that feels more constantly draining than immediately intense. Spurs of energy aside, the listening experience is one I have described as despair-inducing and despondent, but "draining" might actually hit the nail even better. It's not the density of the sound the usual sludge way, it's not the intensity of the performance in the usual screamo way, but there's an undeniably heavy anchor that one must drag when listening to this record.
Musically though, there's a lot to praise Malevich in how they find different ways to sound as despondent as they do. Not only do they shift the balance between the more slow and bass-heavy sludge, and the bursts of more immediate screamo; but there's many nuances to each, often from adjacent genres also introduces. The screamo sides has blast beating and shrieks that betray a blackened leaning, the sludge sound at its heaviest has a denseness to its sound that feels like it takes cues from some ambient subgenre or from how Emptiness deconstructed dissonant death metal, and at its mellowest it pushes right through Amenra's fragile moments into something that's closer to the most fragile of slowcore.
Rarely have I heard so much interesting variety in sounding utterly defeated. It is on me that even with the updated genre tags I still spent half the review talking about an outdated genre tag. Can you imagine if all grindcore bands sounded like this?
