(written by Islander)
We prize extreme metal because it captures and conveys emotional intensity in more powerful ways than most other musical genres do. However, the emotional intensity of the music and vocals aren’t always reflected in lyrics. Often written after the music, the lyrics may be entirely unconnected to the experiences and moods that inspired the music; worse still, they may also be mundane, cliched, and entirely forgettable.
That kind of criticism won’t be applied to the new sophomore album by Cogas. It is rooted, both musically and lyrically, in the frustration, pain, and anger spawned by conditions in their homeland of Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean and a place of remarkable, varied beauty and rich, fascinating history, but also (based on our own reading) a place apparently plagued by high youth unemployment, enormous outflows of young people seeking to escape such conditions, and both mental and physical health problems among those who’ve remained.
Cogas themselves, who have been based in London for some time, have explained what inspired their new album Among the Dead: How to Become a Ghost:
With this album, we give voice and sound to the pain of those who have been lost in the postcard-perfect hell called Sardinia. Generational traumas — past, present, and future — are told through the wounds, both physical and spiritual, of an ordinary young man.
Among the Dead: How to Become a Ghost is our necessity and will to bring Sardinian extreme metal towards a bitter truth, setting aside the themes that have stagnantly plagued our musical world for too many years, in order to shed light on subjects we consider closer to reality.
Our album is the black shroud of suicidal death — mental and physical — of hundreds of young people from our island. An island we so proudly flaunt as a monument to our virtues, when in reality, the virtues we boast about are nothing more than words carried away by the September mistral.
Thus, we dedicate this latest Opus to the souls who are losing themselves in our homeland, to those who have been lost, and to those who will be lost — guilty only of being too sensitive for a land cursed by its own allure.
Have the courage to break the chains you have fastened around your own wrists.
How do Cogas translate these themes into their music? You’ll find out today as we premiere the entire album, which has been recommended for fans of Dark Funeral, Deicide, Mgła, and Hour Of Penance.
As those FFO references signify, Cogas “balances cold, sorrowful black metal atmospheres with a relentlessly powerful death metal rhythmic backbone, creating a dynamic interplay between melancholic melodies and sheer sonic force” (to quote from press materials for the album).
Those are definitely two important aspects of Cogas‘s new music, but there are others, as you’ll soon discover from the album’s beautifully structured opening song “Dead Reflected“.
Backed by sounds of thunder and lightening, the piercing reverberations of the song’s opening notes create an elegant, poignant, and mesmerizing melody of mournfulness. But, launched by a harrowing scream, the power of the music explodes. The riffing doesn’t abandon that opening melody but transforms it into engulfing sounds of despair and anger, underscored by battering beats, abyssal bass lines, voracious growls, and inflamed howls.
Cogas continue dialing up the song’s intensity, discharging swarms of blistering and eviscerating tremolo’d riffage, but also dramatically torquing the intensity of the melody, using layered ingredients to generate vast overflowing waves of agony and turmoil. The music also furiously jolts and ultimately drowns the senses in torment and tragedy.
“Dead Reflected” is a startling and soul-stirring way to begin. As the PR materials forecast, it displays both sheer sonic force and a deep sense of melancholy. It also reveals a carefully crafted piece of songwriting, in which the heart-rending melodies, and how they evolve, are just as important as the song’s visceral, pulse-pounding force.
It’s also the album’s second-longest song, perhaps chosen as the opener because it allows room for Cogas to show their intentions for the record as a whole. Yet it’s immediately followed by the track that’s the longest — “Among the Dead“.
Cogas tie this song together with the opener by again bringing in sounds of a storm and a gentle and gleaming melodic overture, again melancholy but wistfully so. And again, they turn up the power by orders of magnitude.
This time, the music sounds angrier and more assaulting, delivering spine-shaking percussive booms, bursts of violently frenzied riffing, and then a full-on turbocharged rampage, once more with the words expelled through monstrously ferocious roars. Even more so than the opener, this barrage also shows the band’s fleet-fingered and fleet-limbed technical chops.
Yet it again displays a nuanced songcraft, seamlessly shifting the melodic quotient toward sensations of pain and peril, albeit without diminishing the music’s blazing sonic intensity. Eventually the speed of the riffing diminishes and the music descends into dismal depths, with a reprise of the song’s overture to end it.
The next four songs are more compact and more consistently violent than that opening one-two punch, but Cogas still pack a lot of dynamism (as well as punch) into them. They also load them up with hooks — among them, a swirling lead-guitar motif and some highly headbangable groove in the electrifying “Absorption of the Flesh through Self Abuse“; swirling and sweeping ice-storm melodies in “Autopsy of an Hollow” and “On the Bank of the River Styx” that pull from the black metal antecedents of the cold north (early Dissection and Emperor come to mind); and the intensely heart-breaking melodic riffage at the core of the breathtaking “Charon“.
In the album’s last two songs, “The Noble Rot” and “La Fiamma che Respiro“, Cogas turn back to more extensive track lengths. The former is completely shattering, an emotionally distressing calamity of extravagant proportions, but also a big bone-smasher. The latter connects back to the two openers with its brief, somber overture, but then soars and becomes sweeping, submerging the listener once more in a great expanse of tragedy, until it softly ends in grief.
Throughout these tracks the vocals are of equal power to the instrumental work, ferocious and frightening, and there’s considerable variety in the very noticeable bass and drumwork.
So now, at last, we leave you to it, a truly stunning album:
COGAS:
Davide Ambu – Guitar
Piero Mura – Vocals
Erick D Red – Bass
Davide Marini – Session drums
Among the Dead: How to Become a Ghost will be digitally released on April 24th, and on cassette tape on May 5th from UKEM Records.
PRE-ORDER:
https://cogas.bandcamp.com/album/among-the-dead-how-to-become-a-ghost
https://ukemrecords.bandcamp.com/album/among-the-dead-how-to-become-a-ghost
COGAS:
https://www.facebook.com/Cogas.Black.Death
https://www.instagram.com/cogas_official/