Choir – Smithe Thee Smoldering Providence [Things You Might Have Missed 2024]
By Dear Hollow
Bring them tired ashes to the black waters and sing an anthem for the famine! Smithe Thee Smoldering Providence is blasphemy, a molten and silt-laden horror that saturates every negative space with noise, desolation, and punishment. It dirges and roars like the gods that you thought were benevolent and merciful – their faces lurid and nauseating when you looked upon them. Hallelujah, you will go mad. You will embrace your fate with arms outstretched and feet running until you sink. You will vomit and rejoice at the coming of ruin. You will praise your master. Choir preaches to this manic truth and gospel of filth, recalling the memory of a ritual buried deep in a book of death-bathed dark. As you are baptized in the muddy river, buried with Christ, and raised to walk in newness of life, open your eyes and look below and you’ll notice the abyss of the dead and rotting staring back.
Choir is a one-man act from Singapore consisting of musician/producer The Choir, offering extreme metal dredged in obscurity and violence. At once blending the pulverizing weight of death/doom, the raw hatred of black metal, and the cavernous echoes of death metal, crammed to the brim with misanthropic dissonance, dense atmospherics, and vicious noise, the act can be compared to the likes of Impetuous Ritual, Infernal Coil, Menace Ruine, and Primitive Man, but with an interpretation of pain all its own. While 2021’s first full-length Songs for a Tarnished World introduced this noise, its follow-up Smithe Thee Smoldering Providence hones it, Choir’s sound achieves relentless devastation and palpable purpose. And it’s a damn shame it was released so late in 2024.
Smithe Thee Smoldering Providence consists of two twenty-two-minute songs, but the tracklist breaks them into three and four movements respectively – one of the few mercies you will receive listening to Choir’s relentless onslaught. Like 2024’s boundary-pushing Ingurgitating Oblivion, Choir combines the outer limits of extreme metal. However, contrary to the elegance, technicality, and grace of Ontology of Nought, Choir molds the festering and rotten loams of lumbering weight, blackened chaos, and ruthless dissonance into a lethal clay, encased in the thick grime of murk. Emerging like many-eyed and many-limbed creatures emerging from the muddy river, movements will sear themselves into your ears from out of nowhere, such as the Mitochondrion-esque chugging riffs (“Bring Them… I,” “Bring Them… III,” “And Sing… IV”), dizzying brain-bleeds and complete disintegrations into noise and dissonance (“And Sing… III”), full-on blackened assaults buried beneath the garbling Portal-esque weight of mud (“And Sing… I”), and ambient sprawls with a rotten hum and bilious distortion trembling beneath (“Bring Them… II”). Gorgeous synth melodies are sparse and stand in stark contrast during capitalizations of crescendos (“And Sing… IV”). While nonetheless bathed in the blood of distortion, they add a distinctly human feel that somehow makes the album much more punishing by contrast while also providing a jagged light at the end of Choir’s pitch-black tunnel.
Choir has accomplished an insane feat, creating an experience that balances haunting hypnotism, primitive ritualism, and cutthroat punishment in its misanthropic blend of extreme styles. Simultaneously a thunderously colossal and lumbering beast and a hateful specter with teeth of lightning, Smithe Thee Smoldering Providence is a portrayal of divine smelt, god silt, and blasphemous murk. Molten and filthy, hypnotic and punishing, Choir is an easy triumph for year-end lists had it been released earlier.
Tracks to Check Out: “Bring Them Tired Ashes to the Black Waters,” “And Sing an Anthem for the Famine”
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