Review: Malariii – Garden of Lies

Genres: prog black metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dødheimsgard, Arcturus
Country: France
Release date: 12 January 2024

The new year has brought some pretty drastic changes to my listening habits. I still consume a frankly nauseating amount of new music, but I’m more discriminatory with it, pretty much only doing stuff I actively like or that’re attached to my several listening projects instead of taking everybody’s sloppy seconds along with various leftover detritus like some benthic worm. Accordingly, I realized how good music can be when I listen to more stuff I actually enjoy and also that I overrated a bunch of crap because it was less crappy than the other crap I listened to non-stop. All that to say, bands should be sweating a bit when I pick them up now, but they can rest assured their score is earned now. Will the next one-man prog black metal outfit from France, Malariii, falter in the face of my upgraded wrath or overcome it in a display of excellence?

Like many a French band (Esoctrilihum, Blut Aus Nord, and Void in particular with perhaps a touch of Hasard), Malariii play a strange brand of black metal, unafraid to lean into proggy embellishments in its meandering structures and off-kilter leads. Inside Garden of Lies, strange snaking riffs like Thy Darkened Shade move in tandem with occasional shrieks redolent of the sleepless titan Déhà himself, as well as some extra weirdness in its choral elements (“Somnia”) and highlight bass soloing (“Deicide”). Moreover, the guitar contorts in a detached lead tone above the main din in a strangely surreal manner—like I’m hearing the album from a hazy dream state—in accordance with Malariii’s statements about his mission statement: Malariii’s true essence is imitating “the absolute horrors the human mind can get you through and how not to shatter under such weights and lengths.”

Altogether, Malariii’s sound paints a demented picture, shifty and strange, and with the surrealism oozing through the riffs and lyricism both, the overall package comes together sounding as if Esoctrilihum finally learned how to self-edit. Like Esoctrilihum, your tolerance for the occult noodling guitar and onward-marching blast beats is directly correlated to your love for strange black metal, and Garden of Lies absolutely won’t change your mind as it’s relatively tame in comparison to much of what weirdo black metal has to offer; I wish this had the cleans of Dødheimsgard or the eerie dissonance of Blut Aus Nord rather than its rather repetitive march of similar riffs, even if the riffs are solidly enjoyable throughout. 

By the end of the album, I noticed that the songs meander in a not totally predictable way, but no transition ever throws me for a total loop, and I feel far too safe here listening to Garden of Lies. The brunt of the textures and sounds used never changes except for the aforementioned bass solo and choral elements, so despite not being wholly homogenous, Garden of Lies is still uncomfortably close to it. Perhaps taking cues from Warforged or Hasard about changing up timbres, dynamics, and a more stream-of-consciousness songwriting could strengthen Malariii’s formula, but right now, all of that is a part of his strong potential. I sincerely wish Malariii the best at amplifying his possibility for exploring boundaries of consciousness via black metal since the idea is awesome, and we can’t ever have enough darkly surreal metal. So while the whole of Garden of Lies comes together in a complete, (mercifully) compact thirty-five minute final form, it feels like a jumping off point for Malariii to improve. He clearly has a strong concept in mind about what Garden of Lies should be, but it’s not realized to its fullest potential here, leaving ample room to expand upon the potential and boundaries for surreal, self-imposed horror through sound: give me something truly terrifying next time, please.

Recommended tracks: Somnia, Deicide
You may also like: Esoctrilihum, Laster, Hasard, Déhà, Xenoglyph, Ved Buens Ende, Thy Darkened Shade, Collapse Astral, Void
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: independent

Malariii is:
– Mathis Denis (everything)