DISCOGRAPHY

Icons of Void Full-length 2015

current line up

J.I. All instruments
See also: W.A.I.L.
P.R. Vocals
See also: W.A.I.L.

REVIEWS

Deeply depressive space ambient post-BM debut - 75%
NausikaDalazBlindaz, October 9th, 2015
A very new act with a name probably derived from the Nintendo video game Mother 3 - someone can correct me if I'm wrong - A Mother Engulfed in 3 Characters (hereafter AMEi3C) looks like a side project of two members of Finnish doom / death / BM band W.A.I.L. whose name in full is the equally tongue-tying Wisdom Through Agony Into Illumination And Lunacy. At least that one can be collapsed into an acronym easy to pronounce and its meaning is clear to one who has spent years finding extreme music and musical extremes. While the greater part of my brain tries to figure out how to say AMEi3C without my tongue ending looking like AMEi3C and needing emergency surgery to get it out of my throat, here's the review to "Icons of Void".

The music is urgent and powerful space-oriented atmospheric post-BM of the kind I wish more bands would make with a pained and anguished sound that captures the feeling of insignificance and helplessness we humans might feel at confronting the vastness of the universe and its indifference to our (mostly self-inflicted) sufferings and torments. The DM-influenced drumming is one of the strongest elements in the music's structure, with the noisy guitar-drone layers and the keyboards forming a backdrop that frequently morphs into definite riffing and melody and then fades back into acid-shower ambience. The vocals are almost as strong as the percussion and are probably the one thing that listeners will remember long after they've heard this album: deeper than the grave, crumbling away like rock breaking into dust, they are absolutely inhuman and reek of menace and unrelenting hatred of humanity. The music frequently dips into minor keys which add a strong sense of despair and desperation.

From start to finish, the album has energy to spare, with guitars and drums surging with an inhuman and crazed life all their own. Melancholy forms an almost overwhelming and incredibly bleak backdrop to the music and inner mental anguish and torment are never far away. Even during quiet moments when the musicians down tools and allow space ambience to reign, the black emptiness that results is vast and deep. The three tracks aren't immediately distinguishable from one another, and listeners probably need to hear out the whole work in its entirety a few times to be able to tell one track from the next. Second track "Circumstellar Wheel" is highly intense, full of emotional drama, and at its most melodic and atmospheric is unforgettable for the sheer sense of despair. The third track can be a very bombastic and bludgeoning number and sounds less distinctively AMEi3C than the other two pieces.

This album will appeal mostly to fans of strongly depressive and bleak post-BM, provided they can look past the cover art which looks exactly like the cover art of a million other deep space depressive BM records. Though not very long, and not changing much throughout, the music seems to have a lot of potential to develop into something deep and complex.