With a couple of demos and an EP already released this Italian act’s debut full length is as brutal and encapsulating as anything you’re likely to listen to within the death metal sphere. The band’s EP ‘Under The Serpent’s Dogma’ indicated a bunch of musicians not quite satisfied with old school approach by inserting their songs with guitar flurries you wouldn’t expect, which continues into this latest offering.
The biggest change from the EP is the sound however, the higher tonal styling has been replaced with a dense low end approach that practically extinguishes any high end on the guitar work and vocally. Intrinsically this album is monstrously heavy with an impenetrable opaque production that is immediate when the intro kicks off the release and leads into ‘Inbreeding A Final In The Flesh’. The blasted guttural speed rips into the listener remorselessly, as the dark intense sound allows the song to have gravity and intimidation coupled to remarkable tempo changes I particularly liked on this album.
Slowing down to a slithering crawl ‘Take The Throne Of Evil’ rises like an ancient kraken awakening from its abyssal slumber to bombard and maul with inhumanity as the demonic vocalisations infuse that sense of barbarity. That inhumanity continues into ‘Conflagration Mantra’ where the blasted speed unleashes a song of devastating proportions with its utterly ferocious cruelty. With tempo deviations running through the album the band injects a doom-death styling to ‘Ascension XIV’ coupled to the excellent drum work that assails in waves, particularly when the double bass is deployed. The suffocating power here is chokingly effective and leads into one of my favourites here titled ‘The Vectorcult’, which is also the single from the album. There are Immolation credentials here as well as the penetrating intensity of acts like Incantation as the pummelling nature of the song is balanced by some sublime atmospherics creating again that threatening ethos.
At just over two minutes ‘Embrace Nihility’ is what you’d expect an blitzkrieg of blasted speed tempered by bizarre noise additions and some breakneck lead work that you wouldn’t expect as the album closes with the monstrous ‘Triumph Of Perfect Darkness’ a sprawling seven minute doom-death annihilation. With atmospherics the song is lifted out its atramentous shuddering bleakness to produce an archaic desolation this band produces so well. The toning is ultra-low here ensuring that the song’s impenetrability, as I’ve mentioned previously, is positively palpable and creepily effective.
Riexhumation may lay within the old school death metal genre but the Italians offer so much more with their debut album, its inexorable brutality is linked to the bombarding musicianship for a band that possesses an intimidating, merciless ruthlessness on every song.
(8.5/10 Martin Harris)
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