he abysmal alchemists of lysergic black/death abominations Diabolic Oath are back with their most warped and devastating work to date. On their new sophomore full-length uncreation "Oracular Hexations" the band's staple approach of using completely fretless stringed instruments and a triple simultaneous vocal attack to depredate the listener's psyche, reaches truly majestic and catastrophic forms. Their technically daring and transformative approach to the usually dogmatic "war metal" craft has metastasized as a highly divergent and enigmatic mutation within the genre itself, where the crushing heaviness of the riffs concocted to their unconventional creation has resulted in an alternate reality of bestial black metal unbound with truly unseen and unthinkable auditory monstrosities. Shapeless, formless and free of any boundaries, the six lengthy spells contained within "Oracular Hexations" assume an almost globulous, chimeric form, appearing horrendous and misshapen to the listener as they morph and four-dimensionally sprawl like a sensorially annihilating mass devouring the psyche. The gnarled and grotesque nature of chords and musical structures created evoke a sense of disorienting and otherworldly disembodiment, becoming a fertile ground for degenerate forms of ritualism and esotericism that weave an unsettling conceptual canvas rife for the propagation of the absurd. Unbound with cryptic and abstruse mutterings about cosmological, multi-dimensional and impossible states of being, "Oracular Hexations" is an hallucinatory convergence between technical, crushing and flesh-scouring musical genius and truly grotesque forms of composition and storytelling. An indissoluble dualism between primeval destruction and inscrutable bewilderment which will test the psyche and flesh of those subjected to the album's surrealistic destructive force.
