The Prince Of This World And Death Are Fleeting by Eternal Gaze | Review

Eternal Gaze, a Nashville solo blackgaze project by Vincent DeMarco, has been on a constant, impressive trajectory of growth and experimentation as an artist. His latest album, The Prince Of This World And Death Are Fleeting, features nine tracks in fifty minutes, with a collaboration with Heffernoise on synth, and shows how he has tackled more numinous, ethereal territory in creative, inventive ways. It’s truly a standout album from the artist, a grittier record, and the Christian extreme metal scene at large. 

"Sanctuaries Of Blood And Bone" comes in thunderous and pounding while still reaching for the melodic tremolos and sweeps of earlier records like Winters Womb. Dissonant grit riding waves of shimmering guitar is this album's signature, more apparent here than before. The lyric compresses the whole story into four and a half minutes: a garden lost, knowledge bought at the price of despair, "ritual and religion replace our intimacy," then the Word made flesh and a temple raised in three days. Again and again, DeMarco shines in his lyricism as he is able to condense the Gospel in such a concise and striking manner.

Heffernoise gets three interludes, and they chart the album's weather. "Pilgrimage Of The Dawn Wanderer" is airy and eerie, whispering screeches through spacey pads. "Viles Of Luminous Ether" turns ethereal and hellish at once, dolphin cries shriek under DeMarco's subdued noise. By "Snatched From The Sacrificial Pit" the discomfort has resolved into something close to angelic, over a three-line lyric: "My death has made you mine."

"The Darkness Will Betray You" is an absolute ripper and the album's thesis. Cymbals clang against rapturous guitar progressions that drop into blastbeat beatdowns, momentum holding across eight minutes. The lyric treats darkness as a parasite: blind guides, "siphoning your life while you gaze into lifeless eyes," a bottomless well with gnashing teeth that drinks and stays thirsty. Then the light floods in and the voice turns first person. You'll remember who I am. You'll be home again. It’s an incredible shift.

"I Feel The Weight At The Threshold" is the standout for me, though. An almost NWOBHM riff opens into six minutes where DeMarco moves seamlessly between blackgaze, melodeath, thrash, and old-school black metal, erupting into passages both wildly experimental and flat-out groovy. Also the most personal thing here: "It lays claim to the life of my wife, may that never be. The sickness will flee." You have to listen to how the refrain travels: "Please don't leave me now, uphold me" becomes "deliver me," becomes "give me victory," and by the last pass it has hardened into settled fact: "You won't leave me now, rebuild me."

"The Hideous Truth" returns to core Eternal Gaze with DeMarco's cleanest production yet, polished without sanding off the rawness black metal needs. The lyric turns the knife inward: "We have been lying to ourselves under the false pretense of dying to self." It’s a cutting song aimed at the church, not at outsiders.

The title track opens in fuzz and feedback, then does something new for this project, pulling stoner and doom influence in and bending it toward something redemptive. The song gallops, retreats into slow methodical breakdowns, gets heavier with every return, and hands the record its best line. The adversary is "crushed by the weight of our endless praise." It’s this epic ten minutes ending in doxology, and it’s another absolute standout song on this album for me. 

DeMarco cites Deafheaven and MØL, and the shimmer-and-grit vocabulary descends straight from them, with Alcest in the prettier passages. His nearest neighbors within the extreme Christian scene are Within Thy Wounds and Vials of Wrath, though. What separates Eternal Gaze is the object of the gaze. Blackgaze usually aims its beauty inward at memory and loss. This record aims it at an adversary, names him, and reports the outcome in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Blackgaze has always known how to make despair sound gorgeous. The harder trick is making deliverance sound like it cost something, and DeMarco pulls it off. The record earns its praise the long way, through a dark night, a sickness that would not leave, a weight at the threshold, and a lie told in the mirror. This is a superb record and a strong contender for one of the best of the year. It’s exciting to see where DeMarco has come from and where he might take the project next.