Utter filth! It should be banned. This is what Mary Whitehouse was trying to protect us from. She was right. Won’t someone think of the children!????
Don’t worry I have not taken leave of my senses and also, fear not this is not a review of an “oh so ironic” porno grind album. No, the filth that these environmentally conscious Finns peddle is dark ominous sludge encrusted Death Metal. The band formed from the DIY Punk scene and have taken their eco-activism including anti mining campaigns in the Arctic region, their anger and their love of nasty riffs to create this, Ecdysis their debut record. The title is the scientific name for “arthropods moulting its exoskeleton”. To grow larger these insects must shed their outer shell. Quite the metaphor hey?
The album starts with a scene setter – the instrumental “Hellscape”. A cinematic swathe of dissonant noise and a pulsing rhythm, with the knowledge of the Unearthly Rites ethos this paints a picture of a scorched world devoid of life where machines rumble over the earth destroying all before them.
Wow! What a downer. “Deep Drilling Earth’s Crust” mixes doomy deathy riffs and the shriek of frantic guitars that sound like creatures ripped from their nests under the teeth of diggers and the boring terror of drills. Blast beats, deep rasps and throat ripping screams permeate the track as they do the whole album. To the casual listener this is not an easy experience. Each track on the album pummels the senses with spiralling guitar lines that seem to follow no discernible pattern before falling away into a deep dark dirty riff. I found (pretentious sounding as it does) the album best when I gave myself fully to it – for me this was pounding my tubby sweaty carcass up and down on a cross trainer. The rhythm of my tattooed form seemed to match the heavy beats of the drums and my increasing heart rate joining the frenetic pace.
“Masters Tools” has a gnarly mid paced Doom riff that brings to mind American’s Worm – another band with the great outdoors as their muse. The riff starts to slow like a JCB hitting a particularly troublesome rock bed – but it ploughs on, teeth of the digger smashing and tearing at the earth. The vocals becoming more manic and completely incomprehensible.
The title track feels like a fightback by the fauna – a pounding mosh driven muscle flex of a track as the beasts of the earth shrug off their infant shells to reveal an angry metamorphosis beneath. Sisili Piisila’s vocals turn into pained cries like a bird crowing over a vanquished foe. I could feel the transformation in him and the rest of the band.
Man takes the brunt of Unearthly Rites ire in “Capitalocenic Nightmare” (give it a google) and the chaos wrought on nature and the planet is writ large in the cacophony of this track. Mixing Grind, Crust, Black and Doom to great effect – as they do on the other tracks in fact, this truly feels like the soundtrack to the earth’s destruction. “New Venus” blasts along aided by a nasty little punk solo before dropping into an eerie Gothic lull – BOOM into chaos – utter brilliant chaos, squealing guitars and blastbeats.
Old school crust stylings abound in “Fuck Ecofascism” alternating between stomping boots grooves and punky gallops. I see fossils of Deviated Instinct and Amebix in the geology of this rock and the vibe continues into “Sacrifice Zones” with its doomy backbone and snotty guitars.
Talking of Doom the best is saved til last in my opinion. “Doomed” is 7 minutes of utter depravity. It starts with a flourish of insanity before settling into a hideously distorted riff that cuts to the bone like a barbed wire saw. Just utter pummelling filth. The gym gods aligned and this track hit just as I was wading my way through the hardest part of my interval training on the cross trainer. The track helped my concrete coated legs wade through the treacle.
This album is a tour de force – it is relentless with its aural punishment yet still gets it’s eco activist message through as clearly as any clean sung anarcho punk missive.
The planet is fucked – but Unearthly Rites have written a magnificent aural eulogy.
(8.5/10 Matt Mason)
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