Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Ectovoid – Fractured in the Timeless Abyss




Here are 9 tracks of U.S. Death Metal butchery that combine the throaty sinister vocals and blasphemy of Immolation with some doom bass thrusting that’ll please rabid Autopsy and Cianide nuts while challenging the boundaries of classic and modern death metal slaughter. Immediately Ectovoid whack you with a steel fist of bass and then begin to rapidly berate you with down tuned riffs and inhuman tones. They even throw in some unique time signatures and pull out all the tricks to keep the pulse bordering on inducing cardiac arrest while dry drowning you in bone dry charred crematory remains and never EVER being predictable, not even for a fraction of a second.

Everything about Ectovoid is pure necropsy. Although it’s alive and kicking in the rumbling bowel wrenching “Shapeshifting Mass” , but is comprised of decomposed and mutilated bits and hosted by condensed evil, no soul, this son-of-a-bitch devours souls into nothing thus violating the laws of the universe as matter is indeed being destroyed.  The overall tempo is slower death metal with emphasis on the force of attack rather than blitzing as can be heard and felt in the continually rumbling tones and riffs that’ll rattle and subsequently scare someone into shitting themselves form the Vibrational shock waves on “Splintered Phantasm”, especially when that drumming comes in like fully automatic cannon.

You can grab any of the nine assaults on here and find the same strengths throughout: obliterating heaviness in tones, rhythms, and vocals; unique song structures that almost borderline on prog/experimental sophistication leaving the listener in a state of constant anticipation and surprise all the while being charred from the intensity; absolute skill and development without any loss of absolute annihilating power; and extremely dismal and horror inducing lyrical atmospheres of envisioning caskets flying out from the Earth (“Emanating Spectral Vapor”) and much more. This type of death metal is a weakness of mine, there’s little to no melody yet the rhythms make up for it alongside flesh shredding leads and the entire thing comes across as a narrative of some kind of murderous Hell, but the main thing that makes it so incredible is the consistent flow throughout. Nothing is forsaken, nothing is predictable or pretentious, no bloating, just blackened annihilation with a solid and brutally tight rhythm that cannot be imitated, bullshitted, or undermined. Solid and perfect blackened death doom chaos is what you get with Ectovoid.

Listen for yourself and prepare to have all doubts of death metal mastery removed by force and humiliation: http://hellthrasherproductions.bandcamp.com/album/fractured-in-the-timeless-abyss

Unconsecrated – Awakening in the Cemetery Grave (Chaos Records 2012)




Listening to the bile boiling buzzsaw riff assaults on such atrocities as “Buried in The Crypt” one would expect Unconsecrated to hail from Sweden not Spain, but regardless of where they reside they hit my nerves raw with one of my favorite styles of metal PERIOD!!!!! But to save face, this CD is a compilation of their material starting off with the Slave To the Grave EP (2010), followed by the Dark Awakening Demo (2007), and Unconsecrated Cemetery (2006), not a full album of Swedish DM revival.

The first 5 tracks comprising the Slave to the Grave EP may be Swedish Death Metal styled, but there’s some seriously debilitating shreds and other elements on “Exhumating Profaned Flesh” and some change up in rhythms in “Slave to the Grave” that add a bit of swarming thrash vibes.

With tracks 6-11 taken form the Dark Awakening Demo, much of the modern wave of Swedish tones are subdued and what’s left is a mega cyclone of pure punishing death metal. The tempos on “Path of the Ancient Gods” and “Over the Throne” are breakneck assaults that scream of swarming masses of flesh craving buzzards ready to pick your bones clean while your still alive. On the surface it’s easy to say that it sounds like Dismember, God Macabre, Entrails, and so on…especially when those influences are so obvious, but Unconsecrated does differ quite a bit when you just crank it and enjoy it like you should. “Over the Throne” also has some nice doom licks and rhythms added so you get a nice variety of ups and downs in tempo that just radiate “anthem” and pound you into specks, while “Temple of Darkness” starts with a very unique rhythm and is heavily percussion focused before erupting like an aorta upon puncturing… which just might happen with the thrust of aggression of this bastard crushing in your rib cage.

Tracks 12-18 are from the Unconsecrated Cemetery Demo and are a bit more raw in sound and less Swedish style bass tone driven, and in “Recremated by the Sunlight” there’s more of a circular pull to the rhythms, which seems to come in and out through these last 7 tracks. This last portion of the album really bring in an ugly and dissonance in feel, very classic death metal and very well done for a Demo while the generally sound is that of a maniac wielding a chainsaw and gutting random objects and people in his/her path. These Spaniards never miss a chance to blast the listener whether it be by beat, riff or chord progression, and overall mammoth suffocating decibels that feel as if they’re caving in the room.


Released in conjunction with Dark Blasphemies:


For those in Europe: