A cosmic entity has reawakened this New Music Friday -- its name is Silaera, and L.C. is the mastermind who handles its composition, voice, and sound. Silaera has been releasing small doses of its post-progressive atmospheric black metal blend since 2019, and after three bite-sized installments, it's time for the beast to unleash "An Aberration of the Void."

It's hard to articulate the incomprehensible horrors of dark beings such as this, so I'll do my best. The album, while only five songs long, dances between straightforward and progressive black metal, but the crushing, Lovecraftian atmosphere is the constant that ties the record together. Each of the songs is at least six minutes long, so an attention span is required to get the most out of them. The closer, "Fall into Cosmic Sleep," reaches upwards of ten minutes. While some of the songs' runtimes are obviously taken up by the process of atmosphere building, the prog seeps through via complex instrumentation and timing. The aforementioned genre dance is an almost exact pattern, where the opener, "The Emergence of Suffering," is way more musically varied than its straightforward predecessor, "Abhorring the Lifting of the Eyes." The pattern continues through, but the ending song breaks the ritual in a way I'll get to later. For a record that relies on atmosphere, the progressive segments have quite the groove. They're mostly guitar-centered, but L.C. shows some love for the bass on the opener and the slightly-DSBM-sounding "A Celestial Grave." 

L.C.'s vocals seem to draw a little from death metal, as their screeches reached both ear-piercing highs and surprisingly low growls. Not enough to cross the album into the death metal territory, but I appreciate the variety. The best example of L.C.'s singing is in the ending song, "A Cosmic Sleep." This piece sounds exACTLY like the album cover in the most horrific way possible. Silaera came to life (or death?) in this ten-minute epic of a song, where the ambience thickened, the brutality heightened, and the progressiveness... uh, progressed even further? I could talk about the spiraling, dissonant guitar solos, the strings, or the millions of different climates the song went through, but the climax of it all, and the most memorable part of the whole project, were the final seconds of pure screaming. Fuck. The last thirty seconds of "A Cosmic Sleep" left me wincing and white-knuckling out of sheer disbelief. The pained, poignant tones of Silaera struck me, touched me, and probably cursed me.

I tried my best to express my time with this multidimensional monster. You'll be better off experiencing Silarea yourself anyway.