Welter In Thy Blood are a trio who apparently hail from sunny-side-up Los Angeles. Jeez they must hate it there.
Umm… Where to start? Well they are kind of my nightmare review because there is either so much or so little to say about this music and depending on the road you take either means you come off sounding like a pretentious twat, or haven’t done your job.
This is black as fuck. This is extreme black/sludge/doom hybrid. This is Nortt playing Khanate and The Axis Of Perdition as Wold turn off the feedback and listen in with Highgate. They describe it as the soundtrack to extinction which, whilst not original is pretty darned descriptive and so highly successful in getting concept to music.
The sound? Scraped, slow motion crashing sheet metal riffs collapse onto filthy concrete floors, drums beat out a slowly dying heartbeat and howling vocals disappear in the winds which scour these empty buildings. This is a sound of terrible, absolute violence in an otherwise worryingly still world where only the drip of water, the buzz and crackle of residual electricity and the creak of rusted metal contribute to entropy. ‘Bloodstained Hope’, ‘Cease To Exist’, ‘Culture Of Violence’ and ‘Thanatos Instinct’ are the almost arbitrary score marks on the wall from long dead fingernails, there only to separate the set pieces of destruction. Save for the occasional bleak silence these are the only landmarks you have in this apocalyptic soundscape. You don’t even wonder what has brought on this vile cleansing of the world because the horror of the now, of the aftermath, is enough to freeze the brain and the soul. This is not a good place.
I cannot say this is a totally original piece because we have all heard echoes from these end-of-time places before. I certainly can’t say that it is easy to listen to either, but that is something well apart from the creators’ intentions anyway. What I can say is that despite wishing to scrape life away and leave only inorganic rubble and ruin there is a level of fluidity and the organic here that only usually comes from people working towards a common goal. Despite the absence of compassion or pity there is a sense of dwindling, twilight life, of people existing simply to postpone the inevitable and horrific end. The music doesn’t even offer a peaceful oblivion, you see.
This is a complete vision realised. If you’ve come seeking the sound of the inevitable end, here it is. Enjoy.
(7.5/10 Gizmo)
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