I'm not exactly sure what I'm smelling, but it’s a note I've encountered before in a dozen niche perfumes, including some from the Zoologist line, and it's present in Macaque as well. It’s a resinous, incense-like, spicy-woody accord that I believe is pre-made, similar to the classic bases used by perfumers and industry figures like Bernard Chant and Ernest Shiftan. It has a distinct olibanum characteristic, yet there’s also a silvery incense facet that dries down to a funky, incense-infused church pew wood note. It's overbearing and whenever it's in a fragrance, it's pretty much the whole fragrance. It's here in Macaque, and McCartney threw in a soapy jasmine reconstruction to try and balance it, but no dice. Overall, and within the context of having encountered this accord many times before (don't ask me which fragrances, I couldn't tell you after having smelled over seven hundred of them), I'm calling it and saying it's a bullshit move for a perfumer to use it.
You're not creating a perfume; you're sandwiching this monster base between two tiddlywinks notes of green apple and Hedione, with some Jasmone and a few other pricey floral musks. Despite all efforts to make it smell crisp and fresh, it actually comes across as heavy and balsamic, like some kind of oriental fragrance that fell out of the sky and landed on a store shelf in 1961. I wouldn't want a bottle of this—my girlfriend found it disgusting after one sniff, and enough already with these weird resinous perfumes.