Molested

Blod-draum (1995)

Molested's style is best summed up as hyper-melodic. There are not really any reference points for Blod-Draum, the closest stylistically is something like The Red in the Sky is Ours or Pure Holocaust but it's really not that close, any reminiscence is due to the chaotic aspects, and strange, chromatic and/or serialised approach to the melodies. However, this album is much more brutal, and it would be fair to say, also more frantic in the way the riffs are constantly shifting. Most listeners will first notice the confronting production mix - the drums are right in the front of the mix, clattering, blasting, ungodly, at first impenetrable - but if you bother to listen closely enough, the drumming despite the brutality is actually pretty nuanced, there actually a fair bit of poly-rhythmic action going on that allows the guitars to weave in and out of the spaces left behind. The guitars have a strange tone, it's almost Black Metal like, kind of trebly, not full in sound, a bit awkward in that respect, fairly ghost-like really. Between the pounding drums and thinner hyper-speed guitars there is not really much left in the space in-between, in fact its a bit of a chasm, as the bass is for the most part buried, and other than the occasional brief melody, is more of a submerged reverberation, lurking in the shadows. With a bit of patience I find that this works pretty well,  it almost gives it a psychedelic or dream-like quality.

The music itself is full of complex time-signature changes and the riffing occasionally has that feeling of being 'played backwards' or in alternate moments in 'fast forward.' It's just so unhinged and off-kilter. There are more circumspect folk sections, with cleaner guitar chords thrown out, but even these are often played against the background of a persistent drum-beat, conjuring up rhythms of some far-off tribe bashing around, making merry as the world burns around them. In other words there is not really much respite,  but if you dig a bit deeper the melodic style and the drumming are actually really nuanced,  and whilst there is not an easy to find narrative structure to a lot of these songs, there is a lot of deconstruction and re-construction of the melodic ideas amongst the chaos. At the very least Molested's approach and techniques certainly encourage a lot of replay value due to their uniqueness and complexity and the other-worldly atmosphere that they create.

Conceptually the album itself is a fine expression of strife. Within the rampant chaos found within these compositions all versions of reality, dreams, values, stories are all swallowed by the irrational void. The only certainty left that we can lean against is that there is no way of knowing what will happen next let alone what is actually real. And it's that line of thinking that really illuminates the mistier/ghost-like moments littered throughout this album - the constantly battle between what our minds are telling us and the unknowable reality outside of our minds. It's that beautiful contradiction at the centre of the human condition, the world can only be as we see it, but deep down our own perception is full of nothing but doubt.