Hello. I am Ivan Absentia, vocalist and band leader of post-whatever band, Mildred (Foster here, Mildred is a truly magnificent band), where we try to exorcize evil with magickal songs. I like LSD, sparkling beverages, cats, and guitars. Today is my big break, the big score: my editorial debut on Mouths Made Wordless, where I exercise the art of written word and talk about music and try to find alternative ways to say, "That sounded sick as fuck." Hopefully this text reads as well as these markers I’m huffing smell, and just as colorful while I’m at it. Follow me on spacehey for existentialism and paragraphs about my crypto-arab polygamy.
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| photos stolen from Instagram. |
With blistering intensity, Senza kicks down your door and fires off a supersonic blast that careens between the hemispheres of your brain--but wait, it’s not a bullet, it’s Jesus Christ in Skate 3 kickflipping in the 4th dimension and the gun that fired the bullet is a shooting star. You don’t even know they’ve killed you, because they’ve brought you back to life with pulsing rhythmic intensity before you even know what hit you and I DON’T know what hit me, but the sound was 13 minutes of empyrean fury.
Probably originating from a moonlit grove in the pacific northwest is Senza’s first release in 5 years since 2019’s Even A Worm Will Turn--and we’re glad this blackened-screamo trio came back with Celestial Body. There’s a phenomenon I’m noticing, and it’s the convergence of genres, or even the abandonment of genre convention in the evolution of punk music. Skramz and black metal melt together here like they were exposed to a color out of space then consumed and regurgitated by a formless immemorial deity.
Drain The Blood. Hellena’s guitar rises from the ashes with serious grit and a hell to pay before an absurd nocturnal funeral march unfolds via Tim and Mason’s jovial chromatic descent. They emphatically mention in the chant that they’ve come to “cleave the silence." That they have, and open a portal “toward the heavens” they do as the song quickly waves tension to break through to the next track.
Saved From His Grace peels back your psychic eyelids to force you to face incomprehensible explosive blasts from Mason. Hellena’s guitar breathes dissonant beauty--but, it’s a hopelessly beautiful fog drowning the shrieking vocals before the cathartic climax of the track. It feels like you’re being divinely ripped apart by groovy extraterrestrial winds before the track transitions to loungy peace. A single voice begins to call out from the firmament--it’s a false peace. The song then boils over into an explosive chaotic finale.
Cruel End Reflects Cruel Existence. You have no time to collect yourself before this song clobbers you over the head, stumbling and then striking with great precision, but it’s all going according to plan. It resolves to a staccato session where Tim and Hellena take turns stabbing you in the ears while Mason holds down a glorious half-time groove until they surround you, howling back and forth as they toss you around on a trampoline of rhythm.
Isolation takes a step outward, where Hellena’s contemplative guitar lays out a dream-like harmony as a fleeting bridge about to collapse. But, that haunting moment becomes overwrought and fades away as the rumble and feedback fade in.
Scrap The Waste is the beginning of the end. Mechanical strings open and close jaws of violence as wails and guttural spillings share the stage. The song briefly subverts your expectation at the junction of two soft chords before hitting you with a left hook and thrusting you back into the frenzy. They fade again to clean guitar, but they’re not through with you--a confounding rhythm begins and cathartic shrieks take you to the center of this psychic emission. A final chord rings out before an arpeggio leaves you bewildered.
Senza is back and even better than before. Wherever that moonlit grove is, and wherever they're conjuring these Lovecraftian sounds, must be sick as fuck. I’m worried if you see them live they might blow your mind, literally.
8.5/10
Stream Celestial Body.
-Ivan
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