Malignant Spirit – A Serpent to Devour, A Servant to Abhor
Release Date: 6th November 2026
Label: I, Voidhanger
Bandcamp
Genre: Dissonant Atmospheric Ritual Black Metal.
FFO: Portal, Thantifaxath, Choir, Mayhem, Strigiform, Veilburner, Venomous Echoes, Sun Ra, Mitochondrion, Fantômas, Sleep Paralysis.
Review By: Malte Brigge
It’s hard to think of three weirder minds to lock into a single creative sphere than the composer behind Sleep Paralysis, the constructor of Venomous Echoes, and the deathcult voice of Veilburner. Together, they dissolved their original identities and emerged as: The Obituist (“the curator, he who speaks and the recorder of that which transpires; he…documents the end of things as they occur”); Ossiculum (“the architect who builds from what is left behind; … Coagula: From what survives, it builds something that cannot forget what it once was”); and Oxydyz’r (“who transforms through the processes of horror and dissolution. He is Solve: Where form persists, it intervenes; where structure resists, it erodes”). As the Wardens of the Triarchy, they call their disturbing vehicle Malignant Spirit. There is no album here, but an “emission”, called A Serpent to Devour, A Servant to Abhor. Is this even music? Is this the end times? When I press play, will the world be destructed and recreated in their image?
It seems like a sure shot that Malignant Spirit’s convergent pedigree would hit that sweet spot of bizarro soundscapes that just tickles my fancy. The dark piano chords that richly introduce the album while warbling, haunted voices rise to an explosive opening certainly promise as much. And the album is proper weird, start to finish, loaded with strange voices, pounding tribal drums that can also waltz, discordant, panicky guitars, a trudging, bitumen bass, and vocals ranging from the whispered to the monstrous. It carries the sense of having awakened something ancient and ageless, like ruins that have come to ruin. There’s a malevolence here that wears skulls and sacrifices children to cruel gods. The seasawing, bendy dissonance and planned study in chaos can be dizzying, even positively nauseating, and there is no mistaking the influence of each contributor throughout the album.
The moment opener Nulla Via, O’ Nisi Vulnus spills into To Bruise the Heel of Malkuth, problems manifest. The volume falls sharply away from the resonant piano chords, while the cement-mixer drums and textural drone just smush into each other. The drums do enormous work that’s entirely relegated to a punchless, indistinguishable afterthought. The guitars lack tone except when given to piercing, menacing siren calls; everything submits to the barking, sputtering, rabies-infested vocals. Over the next five tracks, despite how insanely active everything is, little is noticeable. Numerous passages (This is the Mystery of the Madonna, Wail! Wail! O’ Betrayal, Wail!) carry too long in service of the vocals, becoming wearisome and, I hate to say this, boring at times. When things do change, like the tourbillon halfway through This is the Mystery…, the production lacks the fangs to bite and hold.
Wail! Wail! O’ Betrayal, Wail! cuts across the sonic void with a loopy opening and pointy riffs that provide some voice, if not structure, but when it finally breaks open, the instruments cannot outmaneuver the werewolf vocals. Wail!, however, has a definitive ending, which allows A Serpent to Devour to begin on its own terms, and here arrives the album that might have been. The drums gain some resonance, the guitars find texture; unique temple percussion and pungis shift the scenery of the entire album emission, though it could cut two sluggish midpoint minutes and lose nothing. A Servant to Abhor carries chunky riffs into a forward ascension with a mean, boiling bass. A recognizable relationship between the clanging chords, chonky marches and vocal delivery emerges: the music, at last, bears identity. Closer …Is to Crown the Wound that Will Never Heal builds the ten best minutes of the album. When the piano rejoins the fray just after the seven-minute mark, it’s a reminder of how much it has been missed (excepting a blink-and-miss-it solo appearance at the end of The Inheritance of Her Ruin, it’s utterly absent after the promising opening track).
I really want to like this album more than I do, and mainly I want it to sound less like leftovers from the Wardens of the Triarchy’s other main projects and more like a terrifying unknown. Malignant Spirit hasn’t done anything that qualifies as bad, and there’s enough good to give me hope this won’t be a one-off. I want to hear something truly, frighteningly weird and disturbing from these creators, because, although A Serpent to Devour, a Servant to Abhor isn’t quite it, the final moments suggest it lurks within them. If it ever bursts forth, let the nightmares commence.
(2.5 / 5)
