Chile’s Undercroft have led a long and distinguished career supporting bands like Morbid Angel, Therion and Suffocation but have remained firmly in the underground despite relocating first to Sweden and now Germany. It sounds like more bad luck than bad management particularly following problems around the release of their fourth album Evilusion. I’d love to know the story of how three blokes from Santiago ended up in Stockholm but it certainly had an impact on their sound. From the more purely death metal sound of the slightly erratic debut Twisted Souls in 1995 and the raw but still pretty intense Bonebreaker two years later they ended up in Scandinavia in 2001 working with producer Daniel Bergstrand (who also worked on this latest release). Their fourth album Evilusion, released in 2002 and the first recorded outside Chile, has an awful cover (some sort of undead vampire woman staring out at us in a not very scary or alluring way) but very definitely a more produced and predictably more finely-tuned and rolling Swedish sound.
But its only really in the last two albums they’ve really hit their stride as far as their recorded material is concerned. Lethally Growing and now Ruins of Gomorrah, the first released on Season of Mist, have both set the band on a much firmer footing and have the sound of a band that have been chucking out this type of album every couple of years for the past decade rather than the slightly stilted and chequered back catalogue. Ruins of Gomorrah sounds as mature as it is punishing. There’s something of the late 1980s about it but it’s the decade after they really pick their influences, from Sweden but more obviously Sepultura 90s output. There is also more than a hint of Behemoth in the production and some of the chorus arrangements (El Triunfo De La Muerte for example), a band that has also worked with Bergstrand over several releases over more recent years.
After a portentous, semi acoustic intro and tribal drumming, what follows in the next is a 45 minutes lesson in heavy, pummelling death thrash metal. In fact, Ruins of Gomorrah sounds just like I’d expect from three extremely hairy blokes from Santiago covered in tattoos and who wear sunglasses even when the sun goes in – presumably because they hate the light so much. Great cover too. They’ve even thrown in a soulful ballad, or at least a death metal version of one, with the title track just because they can. By the time we get to the relentless Dead Human Flesh (imagine massive chugging guitars while someone in need of at least five packets of Strepsils shouts ‘dead… human… flesh’) and towering and brillaint Empalando Al Invasor I’m pretty much a life long Undercroft convert. A thrash meets death metal master class from a band that have probably just done what it takes to get itself a bit more recognition.
(8/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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