Makeshift Altars

    You can't not attract me with an ISIS inspired name like Wills Dissolve. That's my favorite track off of Panopticon, c'mon now. Not that Wills Dissolve, whom I will henceforth refer to as WD to avoid confusion, have anything to do with ISIS or post metal (maybe a little bit); but hot damn do they pretty well live up to such a name.     WD are a progressive metal band at heart with healthy smatterings of blackened death metal, and Echoes  is their new half-hour tirade on the emotion that accompanies spaghettification. As a single song, Echoes  functions similarly to the myriad other progressive epics of its ilk, and thus reminds me heavily of such contemporaries. Specifically, it feels incredibly like Green Carnation's Light of Day, Day of Darkness , though half as long, as well as a fair bit of Opeth's discography. While in this way it does feel somewhat derivative, I have to say it holds an enormous weight on its shoulders, evident from the opening mom...

  “Theoretical physics? In  my  black metal?” It’s more likely than you think.     Black metal as a genre is no stranger to lyrical themes of space and darkness. But the malevolent entities that form Decoherence are bringing a new dimension (pardon the pun) to these themes by focusing their attention on an oft-overlooked facet of the cosmos and our relationship with them: quantum mechanics. Just take the band name to start: quantum decoherence is, as one would expect, “the loss of quantum coherence”  1 ; essentially it takes place any time a particle in a quantum system does not adhere to the general wave function that is expected of such particles. Have I lost you yet? Buckle up, because it only gets heavier from here...     I’m going to promise right now to make a good-faith attempt not to break down the minutiae of every single fancy-shmancy science word these guys throw around (mainly because I don’t understand a large majority o...