Death Metal Album of the Week: Immolation – Unholy Cult

For most death metallers, evil is not spread at the behest of a paranormal entity lurking beyond the horizon, demonic possession or a tempter, but instead there is a devious core of man’s unawareness, parasitic tendency and “blind leading the blind”, leading society to a vicious circle of uncaring mutants annihilating each other through various games and contrivances of modern culture, seen as necessities. Immolation, one of the most skillful yet direct conjurers of death metal art, organized “Unholy Cult” as a series of statements in man’s capacity to evil and the existentialist oblivion in realizing God’s falsehood, because despite the possible existence of transcendental unity the hypocrite “cults” of man wreck the vision into a disturbed dualism. Rarely has death metal sounded as subtle and smooth, yet nerve tingling, as the best line-up the band ever had utilizes its effortless sense of dynamics to “groove in” an approaching storm of apocalypse with subdued counter-rhythm of Hernandez against the dissonant riff, something their obvious modern copycats Deathspell Omega often fail to do because of flawed pacing. Distinct from “Close to a World Below” in fist-pumping doom and black metallic blastbeats interjecting the symphony of diminished intervals, making this probably the first step in the gradual descent of Immolation to “meet their audience”; however here the impression is not pandering at all but perfectly persuasive slithering of a mind-virus that awakens the listener to a moment of tumult realizing retroactively about five minutes of mental build-up having led to an indescribably intense resolution of themes akin to a musical Nibbāna where the tenets of both light and dark are annihilated in a moment of musical nihilism. As is shockingly customary for Dolan, Vigna and company, the songs are riddles and glyphs requiring a reasonable effort from the part of the listener to decipher and actually recombine the parts of the song in one’s mind and through the puzzle man is led to realize an impossible paradox of nature: evil as part of, yet beyond, theology. If blasphemous metal was ever made into a mental exercise, “Unholy Cult” is the crystallized moment of it.

Cryptopsy – Blasphemy Made Flesh

Pre-1994 Death Metal’s dystopian discharge of sobering glimpses into the eschewed nature of reality left in its wake veritable visions of death, fire and unprecedented destruction. Given the release date of “Blasphemy Made Flesh”, we conclude that this album best represents a near last ditch effort on the part of the primordial fire that is death metal to burn with the glory of years past amidst an ominous yet inevitable decline in quality.

A refreshingly explosive album, the intensity of “Blasphemy Made Flesh” reveals an unrelenting desire to exhume much of the prerequisite spirit necessary to create a genuine death metal record. Exuberant, joyful and multifaceted “Blasphemy Made Flesh” employs indefatigably demented and blistering motifs and phrases to create omniscient and nihilistic visions of the perennial struggle between victim and victimizer. In so doing the listener is effectively reminded of this one eternal fact- that wolves lie in wait among the unsuspecting. Exploited down stroke technique combined with the resulting texture compounds this experience leaving one with the impression of being violated both physically and mentally with a blunted weapon. Left battered and bruised the listener is urged to synthesize and understand the presented raging struggles and their psychological implications.

However, despite the pummeling and crushing riff-work an acknowledged necessity of contrast is utilized to create ambiguous moods of contemplation from whence the deranged seemingly view the hideous work wrought upon their most recent victim. In addition to this, the rhythmically dynamic nature of this record fosters the development of a structurally complex album as Cryptopsy utilize a tactful rhythmic precision that through its capacity to delicately change the complexion of motifs, somewhat rivals the expert precision of Suffocation. It is in fact here that we discover much of the vaunted complexity of Cryptopsy, where motifs are manipulated via rhythmic dynamics, and while this may come across as tedious and perhaps overused to some, such technique creates an interesting layer of ever shifting context which listeners are challenged to follow and to interpret. These elements combined with an esoteric yet absurd and morbid sense of melody make this album a twisted and cryptic work whose seemingly contradictory elements point to higher level from whence this work must be contemplated. Although some tracks lack a consistently coherent narrative and may seem erratic at times, expert use of technique, brutality and vision combined with a haughty and commendable sense of ambition makes this work enduring and enjoyable.

Tourdates of the Tormentors

Death Metal has never been averse to tolling the end of our unsustainable, technocratic age by manipulating it’s very machinery against the system, for the purposes of pure electro-sonic destruction. In the same spirit of infiltration and warfare, we’ve upgraded our upcoming events list to a compact and calendrical crystal ball of future live underground Metal massacres!

Eternal devastations – two shades of German Death Metal

Golem – Eternity: The Weeping Horizons

This album has developed a small following over the years but from the ridiculous cover artwork to the irrelevant intro and outro from ‘Le Sacre Du Printemps‘, it’s difficult to understand why. The actual music is no greater indicator, although there are flashes of potential in the songwriting, which echoes more of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok than it does Stravinsky. From pulsing but uniform rhythmic basis emerges melodies of varying complexities like Ceremony’s ‘Tyranny From Above‘, although it’s being punched out by the same AI that must have been responsible for the computerised approximation of Death Metal called ‘Dreams of the Carrion Kind‘ by Disincarnate. As with James Murphy‘s band, Golem have a generic sense of logic behind each riff progression, where the contextual dynamics of mood and tempo totally nullify the sense that there’s any idea behind the compositions, at least any worth listening out for. Add to this sterile formulation some really uninspiring rhythmic filler and you have a largely disappointing album.

Profanity – Slaughtering Thoughts

If you’re one of those deranged masochists who listens to Death Metal for the audial desecration of the senses that it can inflict, no matter how much you end up panicking to turn down the volume before your brain finally explodes, then Profanity might be one of the more tastefully executed methods of phrenocide. ‘Slaughtering Thoughts’ follows from the structuralism and down-tuned aesthetic of Morpheus Descends ‘Ritual of Infinity‘, but add to this the intensity of percussion and spiralling riff-work of Sinister and you have an album that steps out of the adipocere of decomposition and into the chaos of a sonic vortex. Like trapping a tornado inside a test-tube, this album captures the tumult of the mind in a world of illusions, based on the fragmentary nature of perception, creating a whirlpool of thoughts that veil the impersonal reality beyond. Sporadic outbursts of unexplainable lead guitars heighten the mental frustration, but with a kind of resolute beauty in trying to break free, creating patterns that would resemble the cracked and bleeding glass of its experimental, symbolic container, before being swept up in the almost ambient madness. All this brutality and not much groove nor a single breakdown in sight, this is the right music to attack your brain with and tear down all its worthless, mortal thoughts.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Incantation – Onward to Golgotha

You all had to see it coming… with the morbid pall on the skyline and the eerie chanting of despondent disciples. As the wheel of the year has turned again to unite Christendom in a moment of silence for the pains of the crucifixion, blasphemers pay respect in their own ways. A serious, appalling and invigorating death metal installation, “Onward to Golgotha” turned traditional streams of melody inside out in order to unleash a churning madness quite impeccably produced to sound like a neptunean battle on the bottom of an ocean, or a dragon trashing in its sleep, such is the bottom end riff barrage and the asymmetric droning commands of Craig Pillard‘s throat. The aspect most evocative of uneasiness and suffering is the control of tempo, from chaotic blastbeats raining as a multi-tailed scourge upon the back of the savior to the prolonged slow sluggish chords heavy and strained as the steps of one who bears his own cross on his back – symbolic of the aimless and hopeless moments each one of us has to face in the dark night of the soul, in order to resurrect once more, into flames and fire. The development of John McEntee to a potent composer was hardly a surprise since he was tutored by Henry Veggian in Revenant and early on accompanied by Paul Ledney and Aragon Amori of the ground-breaking Profanatica; yet, Incantation‘s debut is a hammer of darkness more suited to comparison with Krzysztof Penderecki‘s “Requiem” than anything descended from rock music.

Immolation – Majesty and Decay

The mind can’t erase what the soul can’t embrace

The most anticipated death metal release of 2010 (along with the upcoming Morbid Angel, of course) “Majesty and Decay” has everything to please any sophisticated fan of the genre, yet still doesn’t quite meet the impossibly high standards of the group’s past. The 2007’s “Shadows in the Light” while it seemed to have retained all the ingredients of the New York masters’ brew somehow failed to live up to spoiled listeners’ expectations. The unfortunate flirting with “nu metal” elements as well as almost complete discarding of drumming-based structure poisoned the arrangements and conveyed a bad aftertaste to the whole record. Still head and shoulders above any fellow North American squad Immolation has taken the prolonged break in order to revise their direction and yet again prove themselves the ruling kings of the genre.

The best news “Majesty and Decay” has to offer is Steve Shalaty’s drumming. The man has been replacing Immolation’s godly Alex Hernandez ever since 2005’s “Harnessing Ruin” but it is only here that he unlocks his true talent. Steve has surely developed his own musical language since 2007 and the band has finally regained its rhythmic “pillars”. Everything has fallen into place at last: blasting endurance, inventive drum breaks and mid-paced punishment. The “inverted” riffing – although not as all-pervasive as on, say, “Close to a World Below”, – stresses the drumming very nicely and allows for some smooth gliding down the interwoven landscape of melody. Indeed, what sets the album apart in the vast Immolation discography is the use of melody. While the band is still a riff-fed beast, the heavy metal melody injecting the solos and seeping through the riffs enriches the sound world of the group, introduces “humanity” to the demonic environment of their instrumentation. The songs are shorter compared to the classic 90s era material, more to-the-point composition-wise, and definitely more “human” than we have come to expect from these New Yorkers.

Vigna (wonderfully supported by Bill Taylor as usual) goes right after Shalaty in this album’s list of heroes. The tight, powerful riffing, the wild soloing echoing with sadness and despair – all of it enhanced by the tasteful and balanced production ensures a satisfying listen. Guitars are put to good use in both the “Intro” and the “Interlude”, which indeed set the atmosphere very well. Ross Dolan’s vocals have become completely decipherable on here without loosing the emotion and recklessness, while his bass is so elegantly put into the mix that it acquires percussive quality at times. All of the above perfectly reflects the lyrical themes of the album: the loneliness of modern man lost in the midst of colossal fight for world domination, the evaporation of values and purposes igniting intrinsic hells and leaving no hope for the spirit.

“Our threatened kingdoms
The world is divided
Trample ourselves
While we claw for the prize”

Still, the album comes with its share of flaws too. The band implements the tension buildup/release approach in some of the songwriting here and not only fails to achieve the desired effect, but sometimes looses momentum completely (most notably “The Purge”, “Divine Code”, “Power and Shame” ). The distribution of Immolation’s volatile energy here often reduces the impact instead of boosting it. This new trick is still very raw/unrefined and cannot fully replace the mathematic complexity of their 90s output. The classic (and eagerly awaited) “last song devastation” is also pretty much wasted here: next to all the best, epic songs scattered across the album “The Comfort of Cowards” feels pretty weak (while certainly not entirely filler) for a killing blow. The cover art is a disgrace. This computer game-like visual representation does justice neither to music nor lyrics. Also, the band probably needs to consider revising their logo after all these years of using a stretched font as one.

All in all, this is a mandatory purchase for anyone with at least a slight interest in today’s metal. It is entirely possible that Immolation’s return will be the finest mainstream death metal album by the end of the year (even with all the mentioned flaws taken into account) as this reviewer doubts Morbid Angel or any other competitor for that matter has the guts to top this material.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Morpheus Descends – Ritual of Infinity

The power of Death Metal as an esoteric form of popular music was perhaps never better demonstrated than by New York’s Morpheus Descends on their collosal debut album. These grotesque and violent mazes of deconstructionist composition are so ridden with diseased, downtuned guitars and seismic drumming, it presents a indistinguishable cacophony that somehow elucidates as much as it obscures the decaying riffs, like the rotten animation of countless maggots covering and consuming the matter of an otherwise soulless corpse. The guitarists’ manipulation of the lower extremities of their axes remains an unmatched exercise in brutal craftsmanship, with both rhythm and subtle melody pinned to a logical structure far greater than the sum of those parts, quite unlike even the more complex examples of NYDM such as ‘Pierced from Within‘. Also, thankfully disimilar to arguably the best from Suffocation‘s discography, the production here has been carefully engineered to retain a filthy sound with an appropriate amount of space between the instruments so that even the bass can stand out from the rumbling guitars, and the drums have a depth in the mix that enables a really tangible influence over the musical dynamics where the guitars, in their sludgy modulations, are largely unable to do so on their own. The content of this album turns away from another New York outfit, Cannibal Corpse, who would later even bear the influences of Morpheus Descends. Though caught in the stench of decomposing bodies and scenes of graphic gore, as the title ‘Ritual of Infinity’ might imply, there’s a profoundly mystical coordination to the music rather than the aforementioned band’s mere infatuation with graphic perversions or the morgue therapy of early Carcass. The multi-faceted burdens of mortality are stripped away as this album decomposes, with songs like ‘Trephanation’ reciting lyrics that sound like a kind of lobotomy as exacted on neophytes by a group of violent Vedantins in order to, we must imagine, negate the mind and its individuated, finite perceptions. As if possessed by the direct insight of an Aghori, ‘Ritual of Infinity’ is an intense meditation on the supremacy of death and the ultimate moksha that the corpse state represents.

O.D.I.R.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Ceremonium – Into The Autumn Shade

New York Death Metal is synonymous with the brutal, rhythmic style pioneered by Suffocation, Baphomet, Morpheus Descends and the less-than-able proliferous hordes who followed. The region was no stranger to slower, Doom-influenced Metal, but the surge in popularity of Brutal Death Metal and the faux-tough-guy images of wiggers that came with it saw that bands like Winter, Sorrow and Ceremonium would not receive much attention within or after the span of their careers. Of all the aforementioned cursed undertakers of doom, it was the last of them to disband after a relatively lengthy existence who created enduring albums that had as much in common with the European tradition of melodicism as they did the desultory and engulfing heaviness induced by their own locality.

‘Into The Autumn Shade’ is a massive recording and a great debut by Ceremonium, using their sound setup of deep guitars and bass to thunder out intricate and epic songs that develop slow to mid-paced melodies, drawing inspiration from northern European bands like Creepmime and early Darkthrone, and with ‘Soulside Journey‘ and Paradise Lost‘s own morbid inauguration very apparent in the greater narrative sense of this album. Deep, mournful melodies are formed from the outset like an epitaph being inscribed at birth and are subjected to a rich, harmonic interplay which highlights the spiralling sadness of these riffs, fragments of which are carried away by heavier and more brutal passages, as the attachment to sorrow in life strips away all joy and comfort to reveal the inevitability of death. These elements are balanced well enough to preserve the emotional impact of such music. The pacing is managed with a riff’s melodic direction in mind, rather than through the awkward tempo shifts that many newer Doomdeath bands fall prey to in their divisive mentality. Keyboards appear frequently but this electro-vocal, choral layer bears down on the music as unintrusively as a forlorn, angelic statue that looms over an open grave, as the casket is lowered into the dirt. The actual vocals provided by Brandon Diaz are sometimes at odds with the mix, but the guitar thickness is usually powerful enough to even the sound out. Ceremonium’s statement of doomed Death Metal stands alongside the European heavyweights of this style, before they would move onto a more Black Metal influenced sound and successfully contend with those across the Atlantic once again.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Wicked Innocence – Omnipotence

Following the course of American Death Metal through the early to mid-nineties shows the beginnings of a noteable schism in how bands approached Death Metal composition. As a new wave of fans became immersed in this extreme music, exposed via. mainstream outlets such as MTV and Music for Nations, the underground ethos of pure artistry became sacrificed to some degree, to reflect this broader audience. On one hand, there were bands like Cannibal Corpse, Deicide and Obituary dumbing down the music and setting a tradition of thoughtless extremity for musicians to pursue until this surrogate activity became formalised under titles like ‘Brutal Death Metal’ (also latching onto the furthest extremes of rhythmic Death Metal to that point – Suffocation, and the simplicity of Grindcore technique). On the other hand, an obviously smaller number of bands went in an opposite direction, inspired by the Jazz-infused music of Atheist and Death’s ‘Human‘, to create varieties of technical and progressive Death Metal. Whichever the case and whatever the quality of any individual example of music that sits within this timeframe, it’s obvious that there was somewhat of a spiritual decline in American Death Metal at this point.

To find this week’s prized album will then require us to venture away from the centres of Florida and the northern tri-states of America, and instead to Mid-Western Utah’s capital of Salt Lake City, famous for its infestation of polygamous Mormons. Here we find a band who were pretty much loners in that continent’s extreme music scene, but seemingly not placed there without a purpose. Their equidistant view of both scenes lead Wicked Innocence to create an album that, though sounding firmly in the camp of mid-nineties Brutal Death Metal, has a very progressive edge with lyrics that are closer to the cosmic existentialism of Cynic or Atheist. ‘Omnipotence’ gets rolling with a barrage typical of the aforementioned north-eastern, essentially, purely rhythmic style of Death Metal, but this music has very little in common with the tedious likes of Dying Fetus and Dehumanized, and gradually more and more progressive tendencies and flourishes of Floridan musicality creep into the album to leave an impression of something quite unique and stimulating.

Even on the level of rhythm, a direction is established within micro-rhythmic units of those riffs and sent spiralling into disarray with a Grindcore fervour for destruction. These kaleidoscopic patterns are hyper-extended into heavier chunks of guitarwork which get disintegrated further in another grinding sequence of powerchords that resembles a frustrated echo bouncing within the walls of some symbolic cube, floating meaninglessly in deep space. The melodies that tear out of this method resemble a less occult Incantation or Infester but are imbued with all of their insanities. Shades of Revenant appear in the shredding of more melodic riffs, whereby the rhythmical aspect is suspended above the beat, causing a profound sensation of impending death. As the album progresses, the melodic/rhythmic interplay becomes more integral to the sense of deconstructionism that the music conveys, revealing ever broader contexts of consciousness, like a reversed Hegelian dialectic. Bass guitar is extremely competent in underscoring this growing expanse of nothingness, similar in role to Cynic on their legendary demo, without being very discernably Jazzy. The drumming is reasonably technical as should be expected from any band that can trace their origins back to Suffocation, which the vocalist acknowledges with some amusing performances that are spewed out from an intestinal level of depth. Clearly, ‘Omnipotence’ was a timely release, before this intricate mesh of popular styles would be undermined by another generation of bands who randomly throw ideas together for no purpose at all.

Morgue Supplier – Constant Negative

If you visualize the modern death metal genre as a knightly tournament with splendid banners adorning the tents of the contestants on an ancient Briton field, you can’t escape the prominence of the progressive camp espoused by Necrophagist and the obscure evil camp belonging to hairy South Americans and occult woodland Finns. Then there are the loved and the hated “brutals”. The unfortunate Morgue Supplier goes all the way to the leaden territory of mechanized grindcore, brutal blastbeat and convulsive gore that is best epitomized by Cryptopsy’s and Cannibal Corpse’s groundbreaking albums “Blasphemy Made Flesh” and “The Bleeding” (or your favorite other pick from that mostly dubious discography). The speed is astounding, the songs careen through slashes of riffs like the beak of a vulture on the prowl, injecting pinch harmonics into mono chord chug while vocals are the dual growl-and-shriek statement we have heard enough times in this beaten substyle. A couple of minor gems arise though. The cover version of Metallica’s “Fight Fire By Fire” is an entertaining lecture on the genealogy of early speed metal and how it almost by itself mutates to something close to Possessed or Sepultura if played with intensity, distortion and malevolent speeds. On the side, the title track “Constant Negative” has a smudged enough texture to operate as a chasm of interlocking layers similar to Gorguts’ fusionesque work on the mighty “Obscura”. Perhaps a hint where brutal death metal might develop if given enough care and attention? I personally could do without the mosh parts, but those who were disappointed by the wimping out of Cryptopsy should perhaps check this release out.