A couple of things occurred to me while I was listening to the new Dread Majesty double single (?) Our Wills Shall Never Weaken/Lizard.
First off, Dread Majesty are fucking awesome and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dirty, rotten liar who needs 100 lashes from the idiot whip, and secondly, this is opera of the highest goddamn order and is the kind of music I expect Beethoven would’ve made he’d access to electric guitars.
And no, I’m not just being colorful here.
I have sung the praises of Dread Majesty since I started off the Black Metal Archives a few months ago, and discovered they existed, and – without going back to check my other reviews as I’m a lazy bastard – I have no doubt that I have compared what they do to classical music on more than one occasion. And here, on Our Wills Shall Never Weaken/Lizard, they refine this Metal Opera into a genre that consists of only one band
And that band is Dread Fucking Majesty.
Our Will Shall Never Weaken kicks it all off, and it is five and a half minutes of sonic assault that has duel vocals on such vastly different scales that they are as different as night and day, underpinned by so much musical goodness that you will feast until your stomach explodes from its delicious pallette of overwhelming noise.
It is a beautifully composed overwhelming noise, simultaneously both as gentle as a lovers touch and as vicious as a kick in the balls from an angry mule, and is a sensory overload that demands you focus your attention on it 100%, but it is worth every second.
As is Lizard, a track I can only guess is about addiction, which is what I got from the lyrics but that might say more about me than I’d care to admit, and like the previous track, it will take you on a roller coaster of emotions, as it spills it’s perfectly crated music onto your soul like a glass of red wine on a pristine white shirt.
It is the dance of the mad inside the whirlwind of insanity. It is a hand reaching out to you as you slip from the cliffs edge, but one that is agonisingly out of reach. It is the song that haunts your nightmares and stays with you long after you wake. Quite franky, it is fucking proper.
These two tracks – along with their previous releases – are so grand in scale, so vast in what they achieve, that I cannot imagine a world where Dread Majesty don’t ascend to the highest realms of Metal God status, and when they do – and are selling out stadiums with performances that mix high octane music with high performance stage shows and tickets that are rarer than Unicorn shit – this will be the moment where the planets align and you head on over to their Bandcamp page and help send them on their incredible journey.
