Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
For some the sound of an album immersed in the realm of the concept is a joyous occasion, it is the epic novel in a surround sound experience where a single journey isn’t enough, and a three-minute track does not do justice. To be in that realm, in any genre that can cope with the dynamic and the expected, is to marvel at the scope of the imagination and the ease in which the minefield of illusion is traversed with speed, agility, and promise.
To go one further, to turn an epic into a series of adjoining musical experiences is to be in a place of mystic proportions, an uncovering of a fabled source of impressively grand marathons that are admired for their tenacity and ambition, but which hold up the former’s ideal to a celebrated point, even as the scale of the mountain is achieved in a quicker time using what might be considered a dramatic, more perilous route.
To countenance such a feat is in the hands of the unflinching, almost artistically heroic, and there is no doubting that is exactly how to understand Norway’s Gothminister in their brand-new offering to the fans of the gothic industrial, the fierce and soul reaching Pandemonium II: The Battle Of The Underworlds.
It is in the fantasy that we seek eloquence of delivery, the remarkable sense of achievement that is captured in this larger-than-life sequel is one of the unknown, unsung, heroes of its type. So few bands attempt to recapture a moment, fearing comparison and the detailed inspection from those with more than an axe to grind, that they wander in a daze of dissatisfaction for a while as the enormity of the past success weighs heavy upon their burdened shoulders.
This is not the case for Gothminister, the monster that is unleashed is a soul driven by a seismic shock of pure adrenaline, its muscles ripple ad flex with each passing beat and one that proves the story is only ever finished when the story-teller says so, not the critics or the audience who gather round the raging fire built of thumping bass lines and guitars that haunt the darkness.
The complexity of the piece is even tastier than before, and as tracks such as We Live Another Day, One Dark Happy Nation, I Am The Devil, I Will Drink Your Blood, and Monostereo Creature combine with fortitude and desire, so the story of ancient realms and the battles that shaped it take another step on the road to proving ambition is never stunted by returning to a project that has more to say.
A class album by a class band of brethren, the showing of belief in progression by adaption is to be noted and admired.
Gothminister’s Pandemonium II: The Battle Of The Underworlds is out now and available via AFM Records.
Ian D. Hall