At first it seems like this is another one of their songs written in a foreign language, but I had to go to the library to learn what the hell this song was about and it turns out the whole thing is in English!
"Epoch Holocene" is the name of the geological time frame during which humans appeared on earth.
"Decimation of taxonomy" means to reduce the variety of living things down to the smallest number.
A "Neurotoxin" is a poison that attacks the nervous system and a "red tide" is a sudden population explosion of red algae in the water caused by pollution. Sometimes it grows so quickly that the river or sea will turn blood red, and these microscopic plants are very neuro-toxic, causing mass extinctions of fish and the animals that eat fish, and kills many people too.
"Megafauna" means larger animals, anything bigger than a cat really. The larger animals have slower and longer life cycles and are most easily wiped out by catastrophes. For instance, killing a few thousand elephants would be awful, but a few thousand rabbits are easily replaced, and a few thousand ants would never even be noticed. "Sterilized" in the context of this song I think means unable to have babies. So "megafauna sterilized" means the end of larger critters and a sign of the end of everything.
"anthropogenic" means anything that is caused by humans.
"Environment of torment" is pretty self-explained. I think this goes with the previous line, so the band is saying that humans are creating hell on earth with their actions.
Now here is where I learned some really strange things. The "pacific gyre" is a massive whirlpool the size of Texas where all the water on earth goes before it is sucked to the ocean bottom. There are many places where water comes back up, and many smaller gyres around, but basically everything that floats eventually comes to the Northwest Pacific Gyre somewhere between Hawaii, Japan, and Alaska, and gets stuck there. The result of the invention of plastic is a thing called the "Great Garbage Patch" which is a massive island and surrounding soup made of artificial man-made materials which are poisonous and indestructable. Plastic and styrofoam can be broken into smaller pieces but they are never destroyed, they are indegestable and collect in the stomachs and livers of an animal until it dies, then when this carcass is consumed whether by mold, predators, scavengers, or anything at all, it collects there and kills that animal too, and so on forever. Also chemicals inside these pollutants slowly cause the sterilization of animals in some wierd way, causing them all to become female basically so that the race dies out. So when the band says "suffocate pacific gyre" they seem to be referencing the fact that every piece of plastic on earth, whether it is a happy meal toy or a d*o or packing tape or a coffee straw, will someday arrive and choke the ocean right in what is apparently its throat!
"Clathrate weapons open fire" was really hard to find. A "clathrate" is a kind of molecule that traps another molecule inside itself and won't let it out. Piss is one example of a clathrate, where deadly ammonia and cyanide are trapped inside other harmless chemicals so that they can be safely shipped outside of your body before they kill you! The clathrate that this band is talking about, seems to me, is a chemical called methane hydrate. There are billions of tons of dangerous methane gas trapped inside the ocean floor, where it doesn't hurt anybody. If the temperature of the ocean floor was raised only five degrees F it would make these chemicals fall apart and the methane would escape and bubble to the surface. Since methane causes the temperature of the air to rise, it would heat the earth and allow more methane to escape from deeper and deeper in the ocean. The cycle feeds itself and gets faster until the planet is cooked and crispy. Destroying the world in this way is called the "Clathrate Gun Hypothesis" using global warming as a symbol for firing a gun,. So this line of the song seems to be talking about firing this irreversible weapon.
"Exsanguinate" means to bleed to death, and "slash and burn" is to destroy large forests to make way for humans.
An "anoxic overturn" is anything like the clathrate weapon mentioned earlier, where the water becomes suddenly unbreathable for fish. Poisonous gases are typically built up in enormous vaults and they release all at once, like a burp from below, that kills everything in its path on the way to the surface. A good clathrate burp from the sea floor not only murders a few trillion animals on the way up, but then it pops into the air and kills any birds, whales, or fishermen for miles around too. I suppose they use the word "vomit" here as a colorful description of something gross coming up!
The next bit is not so hard to understand, "celebrate what we have earned die by a trillion hands" means that the human race kills itself, we should be happy! "Suicide our one demand" is a pretty bitter summary of human history, as it seems our favorite thing to do is kill ourselves!
"Crack the skies as we expand" is probably some reference to the greenhouse effect or the increase of hurricanes and tornadoes or something, I can't come up with anything specific that they might be talking about. But I do picture in my mind the sort of thing like the story of Alice In Wonderland where the girl gets bigger and bigger until she hits her head on the roof. After researching this song so much, it seems maybe what the meaning here is that the human race grows more numerous until we have run out of room and we hit our head on the roof, in our case the sky itself, and crack it open!
The last line of the song is the name of the song itself, "Extinction Level Event" which is the name given to any planetwide occurrence where almost everything that lives, dies. When the dinosaurs died, this was an Extiction Level Event, and there have been many more. The meaning of this song, ultimately to me, is that we live right now in the middle of an ele, and that humans are the cause.
Also I should mention that when I look up this song on the internet, it is much more common to find another song by the hip-hop artist Bustah Rhymes which is also called "Extinction Level Event" and is from an album of the same name! I listened to it, and I liked it and bought the whole record, and now I recognize where that wierd noisy s*t comes from at the start of the Apocalyptic Visions song. It is definitely the words "Extinction Level Event" sampled right off of Bustah Rhymes's song and somehow filtered through some wierd effect so that it is harder to understand. Does this mean that these two artists are friends secretly, or that av is a fan of br? It seems odd!
So I guess in conclusion, what this song means to me is "Humans suck, we destroy everything, and we will all die." This is pretty much the anthem of every Apocalyptic Visions song, and it is why they are one of my top favorite brutal black metal bands ever, really evil.
