Album Review: Gonemage – “Handheld Demise” (Experimental Black Metal)

Written by Kep

I’m gonna be honest with you all: I really, really wanted to review this album because the last Gonemage LP, 2021’s Sudden Deluge, was such a delightful surprise for me. And yet I knew I was going to meet my match as a reviewer, because I already had a hard time putting into words the things that made me love Sudden Delugeso much. Listening to Gonemage is a head-spinning experience; head-spinning 100% in a good way of course, but the sheer amount of influences and guest spots and stylistic shifts on display makes for a challenging writeup. I’m gonna do my damndest though, because Handheld Demise is worth the effort. 

Let’s lay out the particulars first, though, in case you haven’t had the privilege of coming across Gonemagebefore. It’s a solo project from one of the most prolific men in metal, Garry Brents, who goes by the alias Galimgim here. You might remember him from my Homeskin writeup back in April, from his solo death metal act Sallow Moth, or from his work in Cara Neir and Lev’myr. Now, I call Gonemage a solo project, and accurately so, because Garry writes all of the music and performs the majority of it, too, but one of its regular features is a bounty of guest spots—44 of them here, to be specific. We’ll note some of those as we go. 

Musically, Handheld Demise (and Gonemage in general) is an eclectic blend of black metal, grind, pop, rock, skramz, and punk, all filtered through the noisy bit-based lens of an NES. Think of it as extreme metal chiptune, or everything and a Hyrule kitchen sink—it’s all conspiring to create a pixelized fantasy world that you could get you lost down an oversized vertical pipe. This record, like the two before it, is a concept album that deals with a story far too detailed and involved to get into here, but suffice it to say that it’s richly described and painstakingly crafted by Brents. To that end there are also periodic short sequences that feel more like storytelling moments than parts of a song, like the screaming noise-filled final thirty seconds of “The Smelting Madman”, which feature guest claire.computer. A full buy-in from the listener is helpful here; you will have questions and some passages might leave you scratching your head, but let it happen and embrace the chaos and it’ll all come together under Brents’ guiding hand. 

There are approximately 2 billion standout moments across Handheld Demise, and not a track goes by without catching the ears from several directions. Take, for example, the single minute of “Stranded in the Menace of Water” and its ball-buster of a synthesizer death metal riff (courtesy of Cuticult) that dissolves before your eyes into psychedelic blackened terror. Or the opening of “Stairwell of Gore and the Faceless Apparition”, which will have you running to your liner notes to confirm that it is indeed the voice of Sigh’s Mirai Kawashima that you’re hearing. I literally cackled the first time I heard the blasting tumult in the middle of “Father Time’s Grandfather Clock” melt away into a slow, spare electronic hip-hop beat. That’s one of the biggest parts of the fun: Gonemage throws element after element at the listener without telegraphing any of it. Any given song might feel like 8-bit grind, morph into an evil pop ballad doppelgänger, or end up as chiptune DSBM. “The Equation to Levitation and the Chase of the Blood Feast” bleep-bloops and swims into existence with dissonant Nintendo-skramz, passes through some downright schizophrenic drumwork before becoming a ghoulish imitation of The Killers. Handheld Demise all over the place but it feels appropriate and fun, not scattered. 

The entirety of the album is drenched in this pervading aura of nightmarish hallucination, where the walls always seem to be glitching and shifting and you can never be sure if you’re looking at something alive or a hideous artificial imitation of life. Except for on track six, that is. “Slowly I Watch the Shockwave” is the beating heart of the record, a strangely hypnotic resting point in the chaos where the intimacy of Coheed and Cambria’s ballads meets the unapologetic emotion of Angels & Airwaves inside an arcade cabinet. The sweet motif in the guitars combines with earnest cleans from Rich Loren Balling and Danae Lelina to create a few precious moments where the dream is actually that: a dream, a flood of seratonin mixed with flowing streaks of melancholy. It left me with a huge smile on my face. 

Other standout elements include Brents’ work on the bass—there’s a megafun running line underneath the chorus in “Father Time’s Grandfather Clock” and a beast of a lick that kicks off “Chase of the Daemon Glow”, among others—and his remarkably animated drum programming, which drives so many of the section-to-section transformations. “Hallways Endlessly Resetting, Corpse Slide Wetting” is probably the single greatest example of Brents’ ability to fill a track to the brim with an abundance of drum-driven elements that somehow work seamlessly as a whole. The brooding guitar intro, the frantic drums that take over along with depressive black metal screams and wails, the driving blasts layered with haunted cleans, the headbanger of a riff and its towering drum rhythms, the strangely emotional “clean” vocal finish: none of it seems like it would work in a vacuum, and yet in the pixelated nightmare realm of Gonemage nothing seems more right. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

Handheld Demise is yet another concentrated dose of the sort of chaotic madness that could only come from the mind of Garry Brents. It’s a blast to listen to and its multilayered, constantly morphing soundworld rewards multiple return trips to its hallucinatory 8-bit world. Jump in with Gonemage and stay a while.