Immolation - Here In After

Production: Streamlined metal.

Review: Renewing the assault with a powerful second album, Immolation emerge after five years to sculpt from pure sound a newly abstract form of their trademark guttural and uncertainty-inducing metal, using a panopoly of textures and chord voicings to augment rhythmic narratives through the mind of a blasphemer with decent reasons to hate Jesus.

Fitting concept, riffs are contorted and embrace odd and unnatural sounds in which an organic order can be discerned, congealing across songs through the repeated use of similar figures and tones to connect an internal outline of events. Blasphemic chaos in lead guitars deliberately unhinging tonal containers for the use of self-reflective and contorted sound eases transition between fertile bondings of verse and chorus and the evanescent, amorphous vocabulary of riffing which creates transition and tonal placement.

Tracklist:

1. Nailed to Gold (3:54)
2. Burn With Jesus (4:00)
3. Here In After (4:54) Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
4. I Feel Nothing (4:41)
5. Away From God (4:45) Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
6. Towards Earth (4:47) Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
7. Under The Supreme (4:23)
8. Christ's Cage (5:52)

Length: 37:22

Immolation - Here In After: Death Metal 1996 Immolation

Copyright © 1996 Metal Blade

Introductory fragments meld into raging muffled chord playing which reverts to the pure streaming of smooth guitar textures created via tremelo playing at high speed, before fountaining into harmonic possibility and dissolving into chaotic and dissonant but expectant, fertile space for new motion. Depth of partially oppositional sounds enhances mood like descent into an uncharted cave. Transitory themes become reality in thunderous revelations, and unfurling riff progressions culminate in sensible yet abstractly inverted visions of theme. Over this the roar of solid connection in impact is rendered through vocals guttural yet pneumatically projective.

Songs attain reasonable complexity and where older Immolation would swerve through intricate exchanges of maze navigation, now stagger many memes throughout the piece. Where this release shows the completion of tactics unleashed on "Dawn of Possession," it leaves compositional space open for later releases through songs that while indulgent of structural variation are revealing their construction of composite parts in the compiled sense to its songs. The strength of this iteration of the music of Immolation is as always in the inventiveness of riff construction and imagination to match concept to content, rare attributes in any genre especially valued and needed in death metal at this time.