Μνήμα (Mnima) - Flesh Prison Demo
Digging your own grave XIII: Thirsty and miserable.
2021 was quite the prolific year for Μνήμα, giving us collaborative and personal releases in equal measure. While the former hasn’t been that much of a hit at this point in the series, the latter has proven to be some of the band’s most interesting and dare I say, fun, material to date. Flesh Prison is the last of these releases, and makes for a fitting finale to the unit’s isolationist policy for the year.
Following the second part of the Gathering Sorcery… series, I was quite curious as to what path we’d go down, seeing as there hasn’t been much connecting that release and the Spectres of Oblivion EP stylistically. Turns out, we’re back to the piss and vinegar that we saw at the start of the year. Just drums, a bass guitar, and a shitload of high-velocity riffing that draws from all different stripes of punk music. It doesn’t take long for the demo’s intentions to make themselves known either, seeing as “Blood Oath Proclamation” opens up with a field recording from a church (more on that later), which is then immediately obliterated by intense blast beats and screeching. Ergo, it’s business as usual.
Setting this apart from Spectres… though is the insistence on a consistently higher tempo. There’s no skull-crushing grooves to be found here, our instrumentalist is hauling ass on all fronts, and even the breakdown on “Drunk and Forgotten” is as fast as any of the more intense moments here. While there is no equivalent to *that riff* off “Decaying of Flesh”, things here are far from unmemorable, and it’s hard to get bored of D-beats in the span of 13,5 minutes, especially when they don’t dominate the demo. The drumming has always been a cornerstone in Μνήμα’s sound, and it’s safe to say things aren’t any different here, with a slew of little fills and the falling-off-the-rails pace further amplifying the energy found on “Burial Chant”.
What really took me by surprise though here was the inclusion of vocal lines that actually stick with you. Although the vocals’ bread-and-butter has always been sounding as wretched as humanly possible, this has got to be the first time Μνήμα wrote choruses that aren’t reliant on riffs. “Drunk and Forgotten” and “Σίχαμα” (Wretch) are the two instances of this newfound desire to write something overtly catchy, and atypical as they might be for the band as a whole, they work pretty well given the demo’s stylistic trappings. Admittedly, they’re a little hard to parse under the noisy production and the vomitous inflections, but Μνήμα’s never been known to give its listeners anything on a silver platter, and it’s only fitting they’d make something as simple as a chorus a little hard to pick out.
I briefly mentioned the church field recording that kicked things off on the second paragraph, and this motif shows up on the closer as well. The song actually eschews the intensity of what came before in order to let a solitary bass riff set a rather melancholy tone, all while the priest’s voice hums along in the background. And then it hit me: the recording is actually from the celebration of the Resurrection, and it recontextualises the entire demo for me. You see, the prayer goes as follows:
Christ has risen from the dead,
Through his own death he has overcome death
And he has given life
To those who lay in tombs
Unsurprisingly, the event of Christ’s resurrection is cause for celebration in Orthodoxy, but this is where Μνήμα’s usage of religious iconography comes into play. Its intentions are always unclear, and it’s unclear whether it’s done in earnest, or in a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek manner. Given how forlorn the themes of the demo are based on the few vocal lines that we can parse and the song titles themselves, it could be interpreted as a desire to break out of the self-destructive and loathsome cycles created and perpetuated by addiction, to be reborn. On the other hand, the title of “Flesh Prison” looms large over this prayer. Seeing as Christ was entombed in a cave for three days, the body could be seen as a “living tomb” of sorts, one from which you can’t help but want to escape when you’ve hit rock bottom.
While at a glance Flesh Prison seems like a continuation of the fast-and-furious attitude established at the start of 2021, it carries with it a vulnerability that I find quite striking, given how unfeeling and angry the music is. Sure, a lot of what I get out of this is very much reliant on cultural context and my own interpretation of it, but I’ve found myself thinking about this particular aspect of this release far more than I expected. Don’t get me wrong, the riffs do bang, and are one of the reasons I come back to this, but this seems like one of the more candid glimpses in Μνήμα’s inner workings. It doesn’t hide itself behind esoteric song titles, instead laying everything bare in a uniquely human way that makes this one stand out in their wider body of work.
Highlights: Drunk and Forgotten, Σίχαμα, Flesh Prison
Following the second part of the Gathering Sorcery… series, I was quite curious as to what path we’d go down, seeing as there hasn’t been much connecting that release and the Spectres of Oblivion EP stylistically. Turns out, we’re back to the piss and vinegar that we saw at the start of the year. Just drums, a bass guitar, and a shitload of high-velocity riffing that draws from all different stripes of punk music. It doesn’t take long for the demo’s intentions to make themselves known either, seeing as “Blood Oath Proclamation” opens up with a field recording from a church (more on that later), which is then immediately obliterated by intense blast beats and screeching. Ergo, it’s business as usual.
Setting this apart from Spectres… though is the insistence on a consistently higher tempo. There’s no skull-crushing grooves to be found here, our instrumentalist is hauling ass on all fronts, and even the breakdown on “Drunk and Forgotten” is as fast as any of the more intense moments here. While there is no equivalent to *that riff* off “Decaying of Flesh”, things here are far from unmemorable, and it’s hard to get bored of D-beats in the span of 13,5 minutes, especially when they don’t dominate the demo. The drumming has always been a cornerstone in Μνήμα’s sound, and it’s safe to say things aren’t any different here, with a slew of little fills and the falling-off-the-rails pace further amplifying the energy found on “Burial Chant”.
What really took me by surprise though here was the inclusion of vocal lines that actually stick with you. Although the vocals’ bread-and-butter has always been sounding as wretched as humanly possible, this has got to be the first time Μνήμα wrote choruses that aren’t reliant on riffs. “Drunk and Forgotten” and “Σίχαμα” (Wretch) are the two instances of this newfound desire to write something overtly catchy, and atypical as they might be for the band as a whole, they work pretty well given the demo’s stylistic trappings. Admittedly, they’re a little hard to parse under the noisy production and the vomitous inflections, but Μνήμα’s never been known to give its listeners anything on a silver platter, and it’s only fitting they’d make something as simple as a chorus a little hard to pick out.
I briefly mentioned the church field recording that kicked things off on the second paragraph, and this motif shows up on the closer as well. The song actually eschews the intensity of what came before in order to let a solitary bass riff set a rather melancholy tone, all while the priest’s voice hums along in the background. And then it hit me: the recording is actually from the celebration of the Resurrection, and it recontextualises the entire demo for me. You see, the prayer goes as follows:
Christ has risen from the dead,
Through his own death he has overcome death
And he has given life
To those who lay in tombs
Unsurprisingly, the event of Christ’s resurrection is cause for celebration in Orthodoxy, but this is where Μνήμα’s usage of religious iconography comes into play. Its intentions are always unclear, and it’s unclear whether it’s done in earnest, or in a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek manner. Given how forlorn the themes of the demo are based on the few vocal lines that we can parse and the song titles themselves, it could be interpreted as a desire to break out of the self-destructive and loathsome cycles created and perpetuated by addiction, to be reborn. On the other hand, the title of “Flesh Prison” looms large over this prayer. Seeing as Christ was entombed in a cave for three days, the body could be seen as a “living tomb” of sorts, one from which you can’t help but want to escape when you’ve hit rock bottom.
While at a glance Flesh Prison seems like a continuation of the fast-and-furious attitude established at the start of 2021, it carries with it a vulnerability that I find quite striking, given how unfeeling and angry the music is. Sure, a lot of what I get out of this is very much reliant on cultural context and my own interpretation of it, but I’ve found myself thinking about this particular aspect of this release far more than I expected. Don’t get me wrong, the riffs do bang, and are one of the reasons I come back to this, but this seems like one of the more candid glimpses in Μνήμα’s inner workings. It doesn’t hide itself behind esoteric song titles, instead laying everything bare in a uniquely human way that makes this one stand out in their wider body of work.
Highlights: Drunk and Forgotten, Σίχαμα, Flesh Prison
Rating: 85%
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