Adramelech
Review: Four tracks of older style death metal from a band containing at least one former member of Demigod, the Finnish band who created melody within heaviness in a choppier version of what Gorguts did on their first album, or what countrymen Cadaver attempted with their second. In aesthetic, meaning distortion and playing, this music is very similar to early Swedish death metal such as Entombed or Carnage yet bears the unique style of its origin which creates a broader, spacier, transient mood with more destructive conclusions.
The metal of Adramelech sets a different line of heaviness as rhythmic and not as much harmonic, letting the tones serve the violent rhythmic structures set forth. From the European tradition are the fast and grating blast beats, which resemble more musically literate Hypocrisy, but the meat of this music - the blasting and interacting structures that are set up for self destruction - comes from a lineage of downstroke brutalizers such as Kreator, Monstrosity, Deicide and Death.
Vocals are low pseudosyllables that overflow a growl with savage timbre over gritty distortion played to produce sheeting chords of it. The percussion follows the technical style of most death metal drummers, with an affinity for pulsing stomp beats in fast time as well as fusion-influenced double-hit verse drumming. More integral and composed guitar solos would accent this release, which was a prelude to the strength in intense death metal to come on later releases from this band.
Review: Darkened subterranean explorations move forward to merge with rivulets of light in the darkness, mixing the melody of a structure unseen with the literality and harmonic placement of the visible world in its degrading, sadistic, random and implicationless karmic impact. From grinding machinations of the elemental unfold attractors drawing a counterpoint of inner space where the architecture of phrase predominates in a current of harmonic highlights within extruded to provide angular support for tonal motion in the context of riff shape defined by tremelo etching texture and jagged movements of chordal or timbral change.
Its biologically primitive origins and creeping, organic lagging toward complexity bely the power of phrases which several levels into a counterpoint hierarchy summarize and answer them with exact and deliberate motions in a grandeur of articulation which soaks potently into the harmony of the piece, encouraging variants local to specific tonal clusters to reach motivic equilibrium before bubbling toward the surface of narrative and expressing a cogent, thorough connection. Often redundant structures enter through repetition of cyclic riff progressions, yet with the adept centering of harmony these serve unification of a codex of themes and logic and emphasize the thunderous texture which contrasts evolving tonal structure, breaking beyond the rhythmic with faint accents of direction providing form.
Guttural murmurs are a nearby conversation to a sleeping child, giving a place associations from elsewhere and thus a flavor of what intelligence transacts nearby, as they punch out spaces for coherence between the unit of riff and the phrase surrounding its repetition. Slack-handed drumming expertly manages space like a cagy boxer, tackling interruptions first and holding back in ready position for durations of less eventiture. As if spilling out portents of apocalypse, the band integrate for duty and perform with restraint in the style of a morbid priest, allowing the negativity of their message to roll through them while reserving energy of persona for the transcendent conversions in song narrative that bring the listener through the lowest parts of the construction of this art to its highest resounding interactions.
While designed to obscure and bring convergent obstructions together over the frontal aspect of its structure, this work comprised of pieces which mirror its overall approach cuts its own ideas deliciously in fatal sections that reanimate only within the consciousness of an alert listener. As a result it is like all hard-won obscurities rare, and while its meanings once deciphered are evident, provides an endless descent into consciousness in the calculation of awareness necessary to parse what is exceptional in these dark songs.