Review: Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps

Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps

This was a very unexpected pick for album of the year. I thought The Antidote For the Glass Pill wasn’t bad, but didn’t give it too much attention. And at first, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of a step up The Contagion was, it was somehow simultaneously more complex and yet more accessible, but still didn’t give it too many spins. 

But slowly, a tendril of darkness crept into my brain and wouldn’t go away. Bits of the album would float out of nowhere and latch on to me.

I partially blame Bloodborne for this, as the atmosphere between the two is uncannily similar (though chief songwriter Vortigern has confirmed for me that he hasn’t played the game or was even aware of its existence). I apologize in advance for how much I’m going to talk about the game in this review, but hopefully it makes sense as I go and will aid in your own enjoyment of both. 

Every time I listen to this album, I feel I am following a hunter on their journey through the Yharnam night, seeking paleblood and attempting to transcend the hunt. The album deals with a “contagion”. Though Bloodborne deals more directly with a literal blood contagion infecting the population of Yharnam, turning them into horrid beasts, it can also be interpreted in the same manner as Lychgate’s titular Contagion; a psychological and social contagion, infecting populations in swarm behaviour and crowd psychology. 

In Bloodborne, this can apply to three targets: the Healing Church, spreading its doctrine and vanquishing beasts while being beastly in their own right, the population of Yharnam, accepting the word of the church and condemning its fellow citizens to their doom, and finally the Mensis and Byrgenwerth scholars, where philosophical ideas infect them so that they too turn into nightmarish creatures and dying husks trapped within their own mind as they attempt to transcend their bodies.

In The Contagion, this can apply to all major social and cultural infections of the mind over mankind’s existence. Religions, especially those with a persecutive nature or history, strange customs and rituals, superstitions, popular discriminations against race, sex, and ability, and in the present day, the swarm behaviour of social media and online witch hunts which often spiral out of control long before any evidence has surfaced and damage innocent people.

Just as the Healing Church is infected, so are all religions, with ritualistic customs and predetermined prejudices and values being foisted upon worshippers. Just as the Yharnam populace is infected, so is the population of all societies, prone to quickly adopting fads and persecuting/ demonizing based on hearsay and the ideas of others. Just as the scholars of Mensis and Byrgenwerth are infected with philosophy which traps them in their minds and pursuit of knowledge, so too are many academics and students in the world who become cemented in their ways and weaponize this as superiority, paradoxically producing both elitist misogynists and social justice warriors, who both feel their position is so fundamentally correct that they hunt for opportunities to demonstrate it and care more about the appearance of caring and being knowledgable than the pursuit of truth they claim to adhere to.

But that’s enough reaching, let’s get down to some actual facts. The Contagion draws from many philosophical works, chief amongst them being Stanisław Lem’s The Invincible, whereby a planet is depicted with micro-machines who have evolved to operate in swarms. Independently, they are feeble without much power, but when bundled together into large swarms, they have the power to dominate and overthrow humans; this is not done for a necessarily great purpose, but when the idea of a threat resonates with enough individuals, the infection spreads and primitive herd behaviour rules the mob. This can be seen in every group persecution, genocide, and massacre throughout human history, and continues today as all of those horrors, as well as in the modern digitized version of social media witch hunts, where the click of a share button can destroy a persons life. Just like in the usage of all armies and munitions, this is a weapon which can be used for good or evil. The flaw in those afflicted with swarm behaviour though, is the instinct to resort to primitive retaliatory reactions and fire a weapon without thinking or fully understanding what it is they are attacking. The individual does not necessarily understand what they are attacking, but the collective consciousness of the group fills in the gaps enough for each individual to assume they are doing what is right. The troubling truth of this, of course, is that a collective consciousness cannot think rationally, and so there is no central intelligent analysis of what the overall goal is, which has permitted many individuals throughout history to contribute to atrocities they had no notion of being a part of.

Musically, this album is an absolute tour of extreme, goth, avant-garde, and progressive metal. It lies somewhere in the inky darkness of doom with the cold bleakness of black metal, while gothic overtones haunt mind-bending experimental chords and melodies. I’m not sure I can call any of the melodies necessarily memorable, nor are they catchy. The experience itself rather is the hook, as there are far too many melodies and progressions to latch on to a single one. This is akin more to exploratory jazz where there is little in the way of landmark refrains, and instead a continuous story being expressed by constantly new developments and interactions within the instrumentation. Piano, guitar, drums, bass, choir, and vocals expressed as shrieks, howls, growls, and Gregorian drones create six landscapes which timbrically flow beautifully into one another, yet all have distinct personalities. Again, I think of Bloodborne and the oppressive gothic and cosmic horror which drenches its visual and aural identity, yet every area manages to feel unique. Even the musical journey itself feels like a mirror of the hunter’s journey, taking you through cathedrals, tombs, swamps, crypts, lecture halls, nightmares, and culminating in the penultimate title track’s music box outro which overwhelms with the feeling of facing Mergo’s Wet Nurse as the celestial child haunts at the fringes of the nightmare. Then everything gives way to closer “Remembrance”, which has an oddly soothing air as one finishes their journey and transcends the nightmare in a glorious finale.

I still find it difficult to believe this is my top album of the year, and I admittedly don’t listen to it nearly as much as others on the list because it’s frankly not music one listens to casually. But every time I put it on, the moment “Republic” kicks in and I am taken back to this hybrid of album and Yharnam I have built in my head, I know in my heart there is no other album as masterfully crafted as The Contagion this year.