Zao -- Liberate Te Ex Inferis

10/10

Sometimes, things just come together. Zao didn't record 1999's Liberate Te Ex Inferis intending it to be a concept album based around Dante's Inferno. The band had just apparently been heavily influenced by the 1997 film, Event Horizon, and decided to incorporate some audio from the film into their newest album...and then name it after a quote from the film. However, the art team at Solid State Records, for this project led by Jason Parker, noticed things the band had injected into Liberate Te Ex Inferis that perhaps the band hadn't. They may not have intended their dark, musically adventurous new album to be centered around hell, but when you combine it--its sound, its lyrics, its track titles--with Parker's artwork, it's a hellish match made in heaven.
My only full album experience with Zao before listening to Liberate Te Ex Inferis had been to the then divisive album they'd released immediately after it, 2001's (Self-Titled). We'll see how I currently feel about that album in the next review for this series. However, in this review I can confidently say that my opinion of Liberate Te Ex Inferis today is the same as it was after my first listen nearly 20 years ago: it's one of my favorite all-time albums. Of course, saying why something is awesome is much more difficult than saying why something sucks, and I'm stalling.
Liberate Te Ex Inferis has everything. 

Cohesion is extremely important to me. This album, whether the concept was intentional or not, flows through its ten songs magnificently. And the music--it's like you're descending through Dante's nine circles, flames exploding around you, walls deep oranges, reds, tans, flesh. I guess you could be reductive and call this "metalcore." Liberate Te Ex Inferis bucks any conventions. The guitar sound like fire racing down a hallway. The drums flow like water--the cymbals have that same great "fish hooks" quality as the ones on The Appleseed Cast's Mare Vitalis. Dan Weyandt sounds like a raging demon. Rob Horner's bass, the unsung hero of this album, features such a unique tone, you have to train your ears to hear it, but then you realize it's guiding the entire album, like a shovel digging a trench, like Virgil. I can't describe this thing musically because it's such a perfect merging of impressionism and solid form and structure, it defies that--and it's heavy as hell, and dense, and yet so full of space--the room kind, not the outer kind.

All I can say is, Liberate Te Ex Inferis fires off all my dopamine centers. It sets my imagination racing, just as much as it has me drumming on my knees and trying and failing to play its most difficult guitar runs. It's incredible: 

The way it invites you into its opening instrumental, setting a dark, cavernous, forboding and meditative feeling, before suddenly unveiling the full cacauphonus terror of "Savannah." The way the next few tracks further that picture before the middle becomes more contemplative and (in a unique way) optimistic. The way the seventh and eighth tracks bring back the terror, before the penultimate one melds some dark, intimate feeling with an avalanche of darkness and pain--it sounds like you walk into some antechamber bathed in yellowed light and there's an empty bird cage and a veiled bed something has just awoken from and then you turn and see it in the doorway--before the growing anxiety and bleak anticipation of the percussion-heavy finale, "Man in Cage Jack Wilson," gives the feeling of the fiery, growling darkness drawing tightly closer and closer. It's incredible. This album is incredible.


1999 Solid State/Tooth & Nail Records

Circle I: Limbo

1. Intro 3:38
2. Savannah 2:46

Circle II: The Lustful

3. Autopsy 2:12
4. If These Scars Could Speak 4:43

Circle III: The Gluttonous

5. The Ghost Psalm 5:42
6. Desire the End 4:58

Circle IV: The Hoarders and the Spendthrifts

7. Dark Cold Sound 3:10
8. Skin Like Winter 2:23

Circle V: The Wrathful

9. Kathleen Barbra 3:35
10. Man in Cage Jack Wilson 7:00