#162 | Album Review | Serpent Column – Endless Detainment

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:11:44 — 164.2MB)

Serpent Column is an inscrutable avant-garde black metal troupe based somewhere in the United States. Though I did stumble upon a note postulating that they’re located in Michigan, I was unable to independently verify this, hence my generic geographical marker of “somewhere.” Details on this project are scant. The date of formation is not explicitly known. Their lyrics are not published to our knowledge. However, we do know that Theoponos is the sole brainchild and lifeblood of Serpent Column. Their real name eludes us, but this insight is moot in digesting and making sense of the caustic grime festering within their debilitating aural constructs.

Not even seven months after their 2019 sophomore LP Mirror in Darkness did Serpent Column unfurl their deafening sequent, Endless Detainment, a 22-minute mini-LP (MLP). Where Mirror in Darkness harbored an engulfing atmosphere laden in dreariness and perpetually shifting vistas of cataclysmic grandeur, Endless Detainment boils these elements down to their utmost jagged essence. Not a single iota of fat drips from its carrion-picked bones. Compositions are terse and trenchant. Pandemonium ceaselessly wavers via mathcore angularity, oft clobbering us in a tempest of excoriating howls and scalding discordance. This intoxicating vigor permeates the vast breadth of Endless Detainment‘s runtime, however, sporadic respites corrugate its roughshod barbarity. These come in the form of thrashy or rocking aberrations, and while admittedly surprising on first encounter, they render the blasphemous excursion most enthralling. We sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange over this MLP as Connor found it to be a gem as did I. Thank you so much for tuning in!

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You can obtain a digital copy of Endless Detainment via Serpent Column’s Bandcamp page. The physical release is a single-sided black vinyl of which only eight copies remain at the time of this episode’s publication. Serpent Column does not have a social media presence, but if you’d like to stay in the loop about new developments from their camp, you can follow the Mystískaos Facebook page.

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Up next album is our review of Mamaleek’s seventh LP, Come and See. Thank you to Duncan Park for supporting us here.