(((O))) Review: Labor of the Negative – The Triumph of Time and the Disillusioned

Holy crap in a handbasket! What the hell is going on here?!

There’s a sudden, chaotic mixture of jazz saxophones, death and black metal, occult sounds, hardcore punk, and grindcore, all blended into one delicious, hot-and-spicy red bell pepper smoothie with massive amounts of wasabi. It’s the kind of combination that makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire, with blazing flames shooting out of your head, preparing you for this new and completely unhinged band called Labor of the Negative.

Labor of the Negative is an international project based in Portugal, the UK, Norway, and Egypt. Even the band’s name has a serious philosophical origin. It comes from G.W.F. Hegel’s 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically the passage: “The life of god and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.”

That phrase perfectly suits the dark, challenging, and confrontational nature of the band’s sound. Their debut release, The Triumph of Time and the Disillusioned, released through I, Voidhanger Records, is absolutely not for the faint of heart. This is perhaps one of the most fearful, in-your-face, no-fucks-given debuts I’ve heard in quite some time.

There are moments of jazz scattered throughout the record, particularly through the improvised saxophone, which gets thrown into the middle of this theatrical nightmare like something straight out of Ken Russell’s The Devils and Altered States. At other points, the chaos feels like the climactic riot scene from John Schlesinger’s 1975 unsung gem The Day of the Locust. It’s cinematic, disturbing, and completely unpredictable.

The six-part suite ‘Epoche’ immediately throws you into the middle of the chaos. It begins with this snarling, in-your-face momentum, and at times Labor of the Negative channels the Kid A era of Radiohead, but transforms those ideas into something distinctly rooted in death metal. In the third movement, you can’t help but wonder if they’re continuing the path Radiohead left behind with ‘The National Anthem’.

Maybe that’s exactly the point. Labor of the Negative clearly digs deep into its source material to show the death metal community that this band is about much more than simply playing within the boundaries of one genre. You can hear elements of Manfred Mann’s Chapter Three, Cathedral, John Coltrane, and Magma thrown into this insane musical stew. All of these ingredients get tossed into the band’s bag of tricks, creating something that is, as I mentioned earlier, very, very challenging.

But that’s what makes it so damn fascinating. The amount of heart and soul poured into this debut makes it clear that things are about to get even more dangerous.

‘151: The Eternal Present and the Endless Dream’ takes things in an even darker direction, with a gothic post-punk atmosphere that feels pulled straight from The Cure’s Pornography era. There’s a sense of terror and post-apocalyptic aftermath hanging over the entire piece, almost as if you’re watching some horrifying event unfold on a screen in front of you.

At times, I could hear the Zeit era of Tangerine Dream blended with the wild jazz drumming of Elvin Jones and King Crimson’s Michael Giles, followed by Klaus Schulze during his Ohr-era recordings. Once again, this isn’t simply death metal, folks.

As soon as the tidal-wave hardcore drumming kicks in, all bets are completely off during the fifth movement. Violins seem to play out like a musical last rite, while vocals and synth-like structures reminiscent of the Irrlicht era speak volumes. Everything keeps rising and rising, moving from cleaner passages into snarling, Cookie Monster-style vocals that sound like they’re waiting for the final kill to happen at any second.

The Triumph of Time and the Disillusioned may take several listens to fully absorb. You may love it, you may hate it, or you may find yourself somewhere in between, and that’s perfectly okay. This is one of those albums that demands patience because there is so much happening beneath the surface.

For me, it’s one of the most challenging, and downright killer, debuts I’ve heard in a long time. Even though the album came out in August, just in time for Halloween, Labor of the Negative delivers something dark, twisted, unpredictable, and completely bat-shit crazy. Definitely worth checking out, and absolutely worth exploring if you want to add something genuinely strange and frightening to your death metal collection. Put this one on during a listening party and prepare to scare the shit out of everyone in the room.