Quickly following up on debut 2019 self-released album Weltenszission, Dødsdrift are a relatively new outfit hailing from Northern Germany we are told. From here things are sketchy as the 5 figures standing hoodied-up with their backs to us prefer to remain anonymous so who exactly they are we left in the dark about. It’s nothing new and should we even care? Perhaps so in this case as the performances of the players are quite integral to this release as we start playing it and, in many ways, actually define what we are listening to.
Certain things are all that are available, the cover art for one depicting a gnarled tree on blackened heath, surviving the odds despite looking like it has had everything available thrown at it over the years. We have song titles too, naturally in German and translated to give us the likes of Soot, Autumn Air and Moor Fire. I guess it is going to be the music that does the talking and it is here we focus on the execution of the players.
The drummer takes up a huge focus on proceedings the second opener Fährde properly ‘ferries’ us in after a short mournful set-up. The tree is veritably shelled by rapid machine gun fire that hits with a rat a tat precision and simply does not let up apart from the concussive booms from the kick drum for the majority of the album. It’s akin to being constantly shot in the face and makes Dødsdrift’s form of black metal particularly hostile and violent. The vocals are nor far behind this, harsh, guttural snarls with a bit of a ‘core’ rasp behind them fill the gaps and deliver antagonism and discord. Next, we get to the guitars, I am assuming as there are 5 players, we have two of them but then again perhaps I am assuming too much, for all I know the militaristic percussion could be a drum machine and the laugh is on me. We have plenty of bleak and melodic tones weaving their way through the 10 tracks and if they were delivered without so much focus having to be directed on the two aforementioned parts this could well place Dødsdrift in the ‘post black metal’ camp. I’d like to say something about the bassist so they are not left out but all I can think of is ‘present and correct’ kind of in the background compared to everything else.
This is the way we twist and tear through the ten numbers here, each of them at the 4 minute or so mark. Sometimes the melody leads the way as at the start of ‘Ruß’ but it is never more than a fraction before attention is drawn again to the drumming and the vocals. There may not be a huge difference between the tracks, certainly not to necessitate looking into things further on a track-by-track basis but as a whole this works pretty effectively and makes for a bitter and harsh lesson in modernistic black metal. I think that pretty much says it all.
(7.5/10 Pete Woods)
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