The voice you hear in the beginning of Setter of Unseen Snares—the sixth album by the long-running, lone-man British black metal band, Caïna—will probably sound familiar. "I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution," it purrs, echoed by synthesizers and guitars in the background. "We became creatures that should not exist by natural law." The warm Texas drawl belongs to none other than Matthew McConaughey, as the homicide detective Rustin Cohle in HBO’s "True Detective". "I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our program and stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal," he says, and for the next five tracks of this powerful concept record, Andrew Curtis-Brignell speculates about how McConaughey might be right.
Curtis-Brignell started Caïna when he was only 19, using the project as a sort of solo exorcism. In 2005, the opening track of his raw first demo (which he’s made available online) imagined life "without these demons." By 2011, he’d improved the production, expanded his techniques, and opened the membership to include occasional guests. But the theme of personal examination and upheaval had become the permanent thread: "Modern day Sisyphus/ Rolling a boulder uphill," he offered during the massive, mythology-rich Hands That Pluck. "Remaking tower of Babel in my own image." In heavy metal, movie samples often play their own self-reflexive game of "Name That Obscure Horror Film or Philosophical Treatise," but the McConaughey sample opening of Setter of Unseen Snares suggests that Curtis-Brignell is trying to tell a broader story this time. It's not just that he's fucked; we all are.
Over an atmospheric mixes of black metal, industrial menace, and post-rock grandeur, Curtis-Brignell lampoons the systems we love and lean on for the record’s three-song midsection. Like its title suggests, "I Am the Flail of the Lord" conjures a divine monster essentially out to imperil us all. Over a sinister riff, the ferocious title track fantasizes of divine intervention but refuses to deliver it. "Vowbound" trots out scenarios of religious subservience, where sacrifices are made in exchange for supposed protection. The narrator prays like Isaac on the altar and sells his daughter off as Old Testament property. "But my prayers go unanswered," Curtis-Brignell screams over the song’s rising action before chanting out the title like an unanswered schoolyard taunt.
Setter of Unseen Snares is a work of synthesis for Curtis-Brignell, the point where he pulls many of the disparate styles and sounds he’s investigated during the last decade into 33 efficient minutes. That introductory collage, for instance, showcases the nuance of someone who has experimented at length with drone and sound-art. The title track staples a little post-punk—see the strangled, barbed riff that ricochets through it all—to menacing hardcore built by a quaking beat and Michael Ribeiro’s hoarse, forceful bellow. This, too, is the first Caïna album since 2008 to include the assistance of an outside producer; that second set of hands and ears, Joe Clayton, enable Curtis-Brignell not only to pull a decade of interests and explorations into one small space but also to have them fortify one another. Though this record lasts for only half an hour, it feels bigger than all Caïna releases, even the two-hour Hands That Pluck.
That quality become paramount for the final two tracks, which offer the brief rising action and climax of this atypically concise concept album. During "Applicant/Supplicant", Curtis-Brignell imagines a family making good on McConaughey’s idea after all, as the Earth’s ecosystem has crumbled. They climb in a spaceship and head for the "horizon," only to realize that "we are the damned." The journey winds through blast beats and monastic chanting, death-metal precision and cinematic crescendos—tools Curtis-Brignell uses to make the tale of a few rubes in a sky-bound vessel both pitiful and poignant. "Orphan", the 15-minute finale, surveys the wreckage after the crash, sounding like Scott Walker leading Guns N' Roses through "November Rain". There’s one last sustained onslaught of black metal as the end of the world arrives, fulfilling the album’s threat. It’s gorgeous and daunting, a moment that takes the theatrics of bands like Deafheaven, Winterfylleth and Wolves in the Throne Room and shapes them toward a clear narrative purpose. Setter of Unseen Snares then simply fades into silence—a concept record beautifully and unapologetically finishing what it started.
