Dragged Into Sunlight - Terminal Aggressor II (Wednesday Review) + 2020 Update

"Wait a minute, the PMMetalGuide 'Best Albums of 2019' list has not come out yet! Where is it? It's February already!" This group of sentences may accurately represent your feelings at this point. We here at PMMetalGuide apologize for the tardiness of our list, but both contributing members of this blog are not only full-time students but also, unfortunately, have lives outside of the music journalism realm. Although this site had a lot of effort put into it last year, we want to keep that momentum going and increase the quality and quantity of our output. So do not fret, 2020 is going to be the year of this blog: Weekly reviews, with the possibility of expansion, monthly highlights, the occasional specialty piece, and much more. This all starting now...in February. You may be discouraged, and rightfully so, but hear us out. As we are still attempting to process the immense amount of music in 2019, we are gearing up for this next year with full force. 2020 will be our most prolific year yet, and with such, we will be talking about a lot of music. Therefore, the month of January was skipped in order to collect our thoughts. This and the amount of new music released that is worth talking about is minimal. So, where do we stand? Today will be our first day back, and with it, we will begin 'Wednesday Review'. Friday, February 7th, will mark our first 'What Are We Listening To?' where the writers will collaborate to compile a list of new and old music that we have been spinning as of late. The final day of the month will look back at the past month (or in February's case, two) and we will release our 'Monthly Metal Muster.' This will be our jumping-off point into the new year, and with it, a new bombardment of music to listen to. We hope you all are having a good month, and we cannot wait to return at the beginning of February to bring you quality journalism that will enlighten your eardrums to the wonders of what 2020 has to offer. 

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Mysterious UK-based blackened sludge outfit Dragged Into Sunlight is a legendary name in underground metal. Their 2009 debut LP Hatred For Mankind is perhaps one of the best black metal-influenced doom albums ever, influencing most of the artists that would establish the blackened sludge genre tag in the 2010s like Lord Mantis, Indian and Cough. This group created an album that defined the noisy and brutally heavy sound that would flood into groups like those mentioned, as well as the doom metal sound as a whole. Akin to their harsh noise forefathers - and unlike almost any of their contemporaries - the band uses samples of disturbing imagery, like serial killers and witness testimonies, to horrify and disgust their listeners, all while destructive riffs play out in the listener's ears. The band's transition between their blistering black metal sections and glacial doom riffs are also to take note of, as the integration of both is perfect, yet the two are used separately in the music itself.

After Terminal Aggressor, their collaborative EP with Kas Mana, they were signed to Prosthetic Records post the release of their debut album Hatred For Mankind. After 10 years, one live album, another solo album, and finally a collaborative album with one-man experimental black metal band Gnaw Their Tongues, the band split from their label, citing financial mismanagement and abusive relations as the cause. This occurred at the end of last year and created a significant buzz in the metal community. Prosthetic, an extremely popular record label came under fire but did not budge in the process. Two to three months later, this single, Terminal Aggressor II, was released, under Prosthetic's label. This is an unfortunate and saddening situation for Dragged Into Sunlight. Without pushing too far into the details, it means that the band will not receive a penny from this work, and most likely none from their previous work as well. Take that into account before purchasing this album, or listening to it on streaming services. For those of you more interested in the situation, ThePRP wrote a concise synopsis of the situation in November, and for more direct evidence, here is an archive of emails sent to the band from EJ Johantgen, the co-founder of Prosthetic Records.

But with that small, albeit important tidbit of information, we have new Dragged Into Sunlight after 5 years. If we ignore the shady and vile exploitation occurring behind the scenes, this is an exciting and highly anticipated release.

Terminal Aggressor II is not for the faint of heart; we must get that out of the way. For those unoriented in extreme music, this is one of the worst places to start. With such noisy production and downright belligerent instrumentation, this was hard for even I to stomach in certain sections. This release is far noisier than the group's previous efforts, with a large chunk of the single 29-minute long track being taken up by white noise and guitar feedback. The guitars hypnotically drone as the noise grinds your eardrums to a pulp, eventually followed by the drums which pound away in the background, mashing the stew into even a more chaotic soup of instrumentation. The first true guitar is found just after 4 minutes into this cavernous symphony playing a simple chord progression, and with it, our journey into the discordant cacophony truly begins. After another few minutes of feedback, another menacingly somber melody is played, dropping intervals a few times before the harsh noise is cranked to 11, creating a Merzbow or Whitehouse-eqsue layer of thick static that covers over the guitars.

This introduces us to my favorite aspect of Dragged Into Sunlight - T's vocals. The anonymous frontman is easily the band's most disturbing and wretched factor. His range spans from shrieking black metal kvlt screams and abyssal guttural low growls, but he is unlike most vocalists in the game, as his cries of pain sound more like a restrained demonic pig being repeatedly flogged in front of a microphone than the work of a human being. Here, his reserved shouts are used sparsely and in a pounding drum hit, which builds to the middle of the track, where Terminal Aggressor II becomes a bit more conventional. Similar to something one could hear on tracks like "Boiled Angel/Buried With Leeches" or "Volcanic Birth" from Hatred For Mankind, the track becomes a blast-beat filled sludge metal cut with maniacal and infectious riffing that could easily provide the background to the summoning of an otherwordly fiend. T's brees and howls make for an excellent addition to the immaculately produced instrumentation that while crystal clear still holds onto its brutally chaotic aspects. This part of the track builds seemingly ad nauseum until it abruptly shifts to a clean melody that is near as threatening as the one before it. The track grows quiet otherwise, until a sample plays, where a man speaks upon his reckless murders, and his sadistic disposal of their corpses.

Just after the 23-minute mark, the track evolves into some of the most brutal blackened sludge metal I have ever heard. After replaying the melody mentioned before a few more times, feedback suddenly grows out the aether and the track devolves into madness. Perhaps the heaviest moment in the Dragged Into Sunlight catalog, the blaring tremolo-picked guitars and machine-gun blast beats envelop the mix, while T destroys his throat screaming hymns of hatred. If there is any reason to listen to all of Terminal Aggressor II, the last five minutes of the track is that draw. The chaos is almost indescribable, as the layers upon layers of noise from all directions swallow what semblance of sanity you have left. The track begins to slow but maintains the relentless and destructive qualities that it has developed over the course of the last few minutes. Eventually, the music lands at a glacially slow pace but compensates for the lost noise with droning guitar feedback, as the track eventually fades as noisy as it started out.

Dissonant and challenging front to back, this song is testing to get through. If you are not a fan of songs of extreme length or downright remorseless music, this is not the release for you. As explosive as it is pissed-off, the music here is ironically reflective of Dragged Into Sunlight's situation with Prosthetic. Angry, disgusted, and hateful are all words that do a great job describing the band's feelings, and they channel it into a way to make fantastic blackened sludge metal, as they have done on each release before. While this album is not as concise or focused as their past releases, it is unequivocally the heaviest album of 2020 so far, and I have doubts that it will be trumped any time soon.

Final Rating: "A dead gift to your dying world"

Favorite Tracks: "Terminal Aggressor II"