Released May 19, 2023.
This is absolute. The innermost manifestation through art-form. Maybe imagine Akhlys in utmost dark asylum but it would be too easy to write this an being finished. Unique, mesmerizing record rising above the black, depressive, death niches. Truly a Martyr. Enter.
Pre press release:
Suitably, silence followed for once, but surely PA VESH EN was restless behind those shadows, brewing his most unsettling record yet - and so it arrives with Martyrs. Split into three acts, Martyrs bears some aesthetic/thematic resemblances to the shocking French-Canadian film of the same name, but as the opening gambit of "A Vigilian Impending Murk" and "The House of Pain" quickly proves, PA VESH EN is operating on an entirely different wavelength. That wavelength surely carries forward the undulating violence of its predecessor - rippling, roiling, and nearly bestial, with just as much (if not more) muscle to spare - but as Martyrs plays on and that violence begins to reverberate upon itself, ghostly textures arise from that murk and take on new, undead life. Are they synths? Church bells? Actual disembodied voices? Who can say, really... Truly, PA VESH EN has taken to that far-more-Alpha surge brazenly displayed on Maniac Manifest, but here deftly (and densely) layers his creations with a swarm of sounds that seemingly come from every direction, which becomes all the more disorienting and disturbing when the tempos begin to accelerate and disintegrate at will. And survive long enough into Martyrs and one will hear the Belarusian loner's melodicism rend the saddest notes from a still-bleeding heart...and an ethereal female voice bringing the album to a climactic close.
If one's conception of PA VESH EN is still based upon the band's earlier works, then Martyrs will provocatively - and irrevocably - rearrange those coordinates, and those of your very soul.
