By Jason Marecki
Our Raging God Unknown to Us is the fourth album released by Illinois-based noise rock artist Avenade. After a three year break between this release and his previous album, 2020’s Vice Versa in Such Things, Avenade has returned to absolutely shred in style.
Avenade takes a step back with Raging God. Every song feels so much more encompassing and large than anything he’s done. Not only does it have one of his longest songs to date on it, the 15 and a half minute long “Separations, or The Grim in Four Acts”, but the soundscapes he builds are so much more lofty. Everything is given room to pulse and ebb, flowing from track to track as if you were moving through a series of warehouses with each song sitting firmly in the middle.
Even with a new direction in sound, Avenade wastes no time doing what he does best. Absolutely tearing the crap out of every song on the album. There’s no comfort in any of the tracks. Each one is abrasive and jars the senses. Even the slower, more toned down tracks like “You’re Right” or “Myasthenia” scratch and claw at their cages, eventually breaking out into a dissonance of noise after lulling you into a false sense of safety.
Everything Avenade on Raging God does builds to this sense of existential dread. Starting with the album artwork (because I am a believer in judging a book by its cover), incomprehensibly large and warped claws reach out to a figure, trapped within a vortex, a whirlpool. There is nothing we can do. Every song points to the end. As we go on, we hear the songs get more and more almost hopeless. The energy to do something about the predicament is gone. There are short spurts of anger and hatred, but everything is over. “Separations” plays, and Avenade is done. There’s nothing he can do, or even wants to do. As the end envelops him, he reminisces on what he could’ve done differently. How things could’ve gone if he had changed. It’s a beautiful ending to a story wrapped in sorrow.
Avenade creates something truly special on Our Raging God Unknown to Us. If you enjoy experimental rock, punk, metal, music in general, he is an absolute force to be reckoned with. The 3 year wait was certainly worth it, and I am so excited to see what Avenade has in store for us.
Rate ten out of ten.