There is a realm within rock and metal music that even though we can understand it as such, it isn’t. There are musicians that use the same instruments, but move in different, deviant territories of composition. Virus is one of those bands and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “Memento Collider” is a surreal world where everything feels like an LSD induced lucid dream. If I would compare them with a different type of artist, I’d say Salvador Dali.
The main composer is Czral, also known as Carl Michael Eide, a prominent musician in the Norwegian black metal scene of the 90’s, with Ved Buens Ende’s “Written In Waters” being a well-known avant-garde black metal masterpiece. But Virus is not a continuation of VBE. They have similarities because of the abnormal composition, vocal lines and lyrics, but the aesthetics and the emotional and visual communication is different. I use ‘visual communication’ as the images that their music can create to one’s own mind.
“Memento Collider” is their fourth full length in thirteen years and their best. Everything that Virus is, can be listened and experienced within the six songs of the album. Everything is done better, in a more complete and efficient way. It is a trip to deserted fields along with a circus of curiosities; a composed narration of undefined entities.
“Afield” opens the show. It has a funky bass throughout the song, creating a danceable and cheerful rhythm, along with surreal lyrics and the performance of a voice that moves between madness and clarity. The guitars are creating a subtle narrative, just below the bass, with chords that vibrate in repeating patterns while the drums maintain upbeat, jazz rhythms. Then “Rogue Fossil” comes. An avant-rock masterpiece, with guitars that remind me of Captain Beefheart and the voice being the narrator of a Hunter S Thomson story, filled with hallucinations and optical illusions. Costin Chioreanu, of Romania’s Bloodway and a multimedia artist, created the video which you can see above.
“Memento Collider” needs to be experienced in its entirety by letting yourself sink within the lucid visions of a madman, as he describes in cryptic forms the movement of unseen forces. Spirits, ghosts, mirroring faces and frayed experiences that mix fantasy and reality, create a world that is here but also there, within but also without us. It is a trip into the unconscious creations of our minds and hearts. And if you ever see someone dancing absent minded, drunken with the joys of otherworldly visions, sit beside them and observe how Virus can take hold of reality and twist it into a concave dream, a vessel of words and music notes that come together with a will of their own. Listen and let it take you where it may.
Score: 85/100
For Rock Overdose,
Bill Xenopoulos
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