Blackened Perfection - "Eidolon" Review (100%)
Everyone can just stop playing music now.
Eidolon is an album that can never be replicated. Even if you were to take the exact same instruments, the same recording, the same emotions and thoughts, the results will not be the same, not by a long shot. Eidolon is an album of such majestic intensity and such unmitigated brilliance that it requires a single moment in time to be harnessed for its creation. There is nothing like this album, nothing like Phantom.
Phantom is a one-man project. The music reflects it, utterly single-minded, it couldn't possibly be the creation of multiple entities - it's simply too pure to be so. There's certainly nothing like the 'band' Phantom.
While flickers of other bands might occasionally be apparent, albeit in a purely aesthetic dimension, the core of Phantom is so intoxicatingly unique that it easily rises above a sea of clones and imitators like some sort of blackened phoenix. Eidolon is such distant madness, so separated from the rest of art that it almost seems like an entity unto itself that can't really be pigeonholed into such a shallow category as music.
There is a reason this is the only album that manages to maintain a consistent 100% score on Metalious, no matter how many reviews it receives.
One might be tempted to describe Phantom's music as black metal, but upon further examination such is a woefully inadequate genre to apply to such a creation. Some people just call it 'Phantom metal', a reference to the absolutely prodigious uniqueness of the band. But that's still a simplistic - and idiosyncratic - definition.
A more accurate phrase would be 'blackened horror music', which comes a bit closer to grasping the vastness of Phantom while avoiding the vagueness and ambiguity of calling the music simply by the name of its creator. One could even say that it is a reinterpretation of the traditional horror psyche in a black metal aesthetic, yet driving the artistic expression of both the feeling of dread and the genre further by its mere presence in the medium.
Blackened Perfection
I cannot stress this enough: Phantom is far, far beyond the vast majority of music today, both sonically and conceptually.
The chance of someone being able to write songs as advanced as those present on Eidolon is slim at best, at least in this point in time. The music is pure blackness, not to say that it is necessarily 'dark', especially compared to some of Phantom's earlier work such as Dementia or the debut album Divine Necromancy, but that it speaks to a psychic design rarely seen and even more rarely mastered to such a degree.
The music present is hugely ritualistic, making Transilvanian Hunger seem like technical death metal in comparison, but perhaps not as minimalist and with somewhat shorter songs.
Vocals are harsh yet soothing rasps, usually pretty low growls with the occasional high-pitched scream. The quality is raw, but the production itself is pretty clean especially compared to the rest of Phantom's albums, and it perfectly suits the music.
Eidolon is quite special considering that there is very little of the dissonance Phantom is best known for, in fact, despite the style of this album being most aptly described as 'raw blackness', some of the songs appear quite 'bright' in a horribly perverted way.
And yet it strikes me that this is the only way such an album could be made, with such an overwelming paradox that you have to listen to it in its entirety to fully grasp the subtleties of Phantom's music.
Any more clarity and elegance would destroy the passion and beauty that define Eidolon very much through its brazen, fearless devotion to blackness and horror, and any more rawness would obliterate its majestic aura.
Let it be known that this is not music for those that wish for something aesthetically pleasing on a symptomatic level, but for those who will stare into the abyss with no fear to its returning gaze.
Eidolon is music for those that want to be deranged, so much that this album may very well be the closest music to the ideology and philosophy of black metal that the world has ever seen.
Music for sunrise over isles, or over towers of steel, music for communion with nature or with raw brutality.
Eidolon is true blackened perfection.
Eidolon score: 100/100.
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