Review: Déhà & Gnaw Their Tongues – Rituel des Ancêtres

Style: experimental black metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Stravinsky, The Body, The Ruins of Beverast 
Review by: Andy
Country: Belgium, Netherlands
Release date: 7 April, 2023

Ah the trope of the prolific one-man black metal outfit! In the past couple years, Kosm (Void of Nothingness) and Nox Victoria have gained notoriety in my sphere of influence by nearly constantly releasing singles, EPs, and LPs under a slew of names, yet Déhà and Gnaw Their Tongues are some of the OGs. Our Belgian champion of often outside-the-box black metal, Déhà, has thirty-one “currently active” bands on Metallum, and Maurice de Jong of Gnaw Their Tongues clocks in with a tidy thirty. These numbers are for different projects and bands, by the way, not mere albums. I’ve frantically tried to keep up with these artists’ recent output for the last few years, and I couldn’t do anything but laugh when I did my weekly check of their Metallum page and saw they had a split out together. 

…I stopped laughing pretty quickly when the music started. Gnaw Their Tongues’ monolithic “The Sacrificial Dance” initializes the two track split, balancing careful symphonics with slightly sloppier black metal. While many of the previous Gnaw Their Tongues albums are a chaotic menagerie of screeching industrial electronics and biting noisy black metal, this time around, de Jong finds his inspiration in Stravinsky more so than in a haunted construction site. The dense, eerie madness worthy of the Gnaw Their Tongues branding still seeps through, of course—just as if filtered by the regality of SepticFlesh. The track is a delirious ballet with orchestrations flashing out of metal violence like a swarm of bees. As a good modernist track, “The Sacrificial Dance” pushes the boundaries of established paradigms, forcing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring into new territories of sonic discomfort with its injection of brutality. These modernist techniques further materialize as the track’s crescendos cyclically evaporate into shifting electronics. Maurice de Jong paces “The Sacrificial Dance” excellently, and while occasionally I think the maniacal metal can weaken the impact of the orchestration, it easily ranks among my favorite of Maurice de Jong’s plentiful opera. 

Déhà, however, leans much more into a second-wave black metal onslaught, much happier to pummel at the start than the more ruminative Gnaw Their Tongues contribution. I have no complaints about that, though, as the riffage is consistently head-bangable, occasionally striving toward the fiery harmonized peaks of Mare Cognitum, and the vocals–the highlight of the track–sound uniquely like a furious pterodactyl. The shrieks are unlike almost anything else I’ve heard on a metal record, and I adore the style. Moreover, around the middle, an ominous shift into more ritual ambient prioritizes a subtle chant over bubbling electronics and an almost tribal drum beat. When, in the final few minutes, the two aspects of the track blend together into an epic culmination of Déhà’s vision, the necessity for both tracks to be longform is obvious. The sprawling, Stravinsky-informed journey that Déhà and Gnaw Their Tongues achieve together is astonishingly cool.

So this answers the age-old question of what happens when two of northwestern Europe’s premier workaholics come together… we get some of their combined best work. I do have small gripes about the production, especially how the orchestrations on “The Sacrificial Dance” don’t cut as well through the metal as I’d like. Other issues about the split’s overall flow–a lack of homogeneity between the two tracks especially–also prevent it from reaching the zenith of either of their discogs, but color me impressed with the project. 

Recommended tracks: The Sacrificial Dance, Ritual Action of the Ancestors
You may also like: Tchornobog, Jute Gyte, Omega Infinity, SkyThala
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Metal-Archives Page

Label: Independent

Déhà and Gnaw Their Tongues are:
– Déhà (everything, Déhà)
– Maurice de Jong (everything, Gnaw Their Tongues)