Psalm by Psalm

The cultural death of God also means the cultural death of spirit, leaving us alone with our bodies as we confront our sensory perception as the one and only plane of existence. New York post metal band Psalm converts this helpless, paranoid realization into fourteen minutes of extreme body horror on their self-titled EP, reveling in the meaningless, gruesome destruction that every body endures. A post rock, almost kraut rock insistence on steady, repeating patterns rules the quieter moments of the album, allowing the band to build up to their staggering dynamic heights. These peaks represent that iconic moment of reveal in a body horror film, the instant when we realize how much worse things are than we possibly could have imagined, when our sense of security shatters into a million pieces as we imagine ourselves decimated in such a way. With no spirit to continue after this gruesome end, this absurd dismemberment becomes our afterlife, a momentary hell that plunges us into the sort of permanent death that even the darkest religious passages would never imagine.