Last year’s Crown of Curses was a bleak, and traumatically violent assault on the senses. All Pain is brewed from the same cauldron, but pours out harder, sharper riffs and some delirious skeins of melodic trance.
Phenomenal album, and definitely one of the year’s best.
The sole province of tireless mainman A|V, ABDUCTION officially began foul life with the release of a debut demo in October 2016. An auspicious if not all-too-brief start, that demo was soon followed by the band's debut album, To Further Dreams of Failure, released by INFERNA PROFUNDUS in April 2017. Here unfurled the fullness of ABDUCTION's foulness, a rank 'n' cantankerous full-length introduction to A|V's aesthetic. Grim and spectral yet emitting an elusive air of bestiality, To Further Dreams of Failure truly put the name of ABDUCTION UK on the international map.
Later in 2017, an extremely limited tape-only EP tellingly titled Respiratory Prison continued ABDUCTION's onward-and-abyssward advance, to be followed by the band's second album, A Crown of Curses, in August 2018. Consolidating the strengths of its long-form predecessor whilst opening previously-unexplored tombs, A Crown of Curses was a rawer and yet more magisterial version of ABDUCTION's black metal vision. Simultaneously, this second album drank from the well of black metal's second-wave classicism and spit back wholly modern fire, tearing asunder the ragged cloth of nostalgia. But alas, the best was still to come...
At last, it arrives with ABDUCTION's highly anticipated third album, All Pain as Penance. Ever aptly titled, All Pain as Penance is a soul-flaying plunge into the psyche's craggiest, most malodorous depths. One could say that album #3 is the best of both full-length worlds - the gnawing violence of the debut, the desolate atmospheres of the second - but that only tells half the story here. Recorded by Ian Boult of Stuck on a Name Studios, with EG on session drums and A|V handling all else, All Pain as Penance immediately conveys an ABDUCTION at its most robust and punishingly physical. Unlike so much "one-man black metal," this record truly sounds like a whole BAND - which isn't entirely surprising, given that A|V has made ABDUCTION an increasingly prolific force on the live front. From there, this firm foundation allows him to explore coruscating gnarliness and beyond-the-shade dread alike, coalescing into an astute balance between form and function, spirituality and physicality. Above all, All Pain as Penance proves that black metal need not sacrifice muscle nor ambience to convey its darkest secrets: both worlds can be destroyed equally, only to rebuilt in gleamingly obsidian austerity.
UK black metal is continually being renewed, continually cycling through new generations of devotees - and pretenders. ABDUCTION cares not for contemporaries, neither domestically nor abroad; only the experience of black metal's most sacred sensations matter. Ever restless, ABDUCTION now reveals its darkest truth: All Pain as Penance.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
