Binah - A Triad of Plagues EP (2014)

Binah's 2012 album Hallucinating in Resurrecture was a fairly outstanding effort amidst the miasma of trending caverncore. Long on suffocating, evil atmosphere and short on wasted riffing choices, it's something I'll still break out from time to time when I want to do as the natives do and wax subterranean. That said, this new EP A Triad of Plagues blows it away in approximately as long as it takes for the first track "Rupture of Silence" to begin and end. While I might have ignorantly assumed that the UK trio would channel their sound into something even more ominous and dreary, they instead have injected it with some momentum and vivacity, a hint or two of more overt melodic tendencies that contrast very well against IRG's piercing, resonant growls.

The atmospherics are still fully intact, mind you, with those roiling layers of rhythm guitar suspended just beneath the haunting synthesizers, but there is a definite sense of 'shit kicking' here that makes you wanna strap on the combat boots and pirouette straight into a delicious d-beating. Somewhere in there you've got the Swedish guitar tone embedded in the songwriting, but like other killer bands (Corrosive Carcass, Repugnant, etc) it just doesn't take center stage to the point that they ever feel like some mere copy of Left Hand Path or Dismember. There's also a Finnish influence circa bands like Convulse and Purtenance, only the first tune is a little more uptempo, and the last, "Torpid Blight of the Spirit" centers on these fiery chugging passages with loads of airy atmospheric embellishments sounding off in the distance, multi-tracked growls and snarls and just this massive nature to it which has kept me listening repeatedly. The sound effects are great, the lyrics awesome, the eerie distortion on the guitars when they're shifting into a more cautious, soundtrack-like perspective, and some really sweet drum fills to help the music feel lively and organic even though it is clearly very much fucking dead.

The only complaint I have for this is that it's so freaking short that I felt slightly unfulfilled, craving a sophomore full-length almost instantly after the first time I ran through the two and a half tunes on the 7". 12 minutes of morbid escape is sometimes just not enough, but if they can put out something of this quality while keeping in mind the variety hinted at on these songs, I feel like the proper follow up to Hallucinating will trump it without much difficulty. In the meantime, if you can find this 7" I'd advice you check it out. As jaded as I've become with the whole death metal throwback scene, with diehard blowhards lauding every single recording in the field regardless of how derivative and/or mediocre it really is, there are still a dozen or so acts in it that are churning out that beautiful festering flesh that has devoured me since the late 80s, and Binah I count proudly among them.

Verdict: Win [8.5/10] (idle is the nature of fallen man)

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Binah - Hallucinating in Resurrecture (2012)

The last thing the world needs right now is another of these cavernous, old school death metal throwbacks, but that doesn't stop Binah from shoving that sentiment straight up my nether region, or excelling at this particular sound. This UK band didn't get the memo. To be fair, Hallucinating in Resurrecture is not nearly so derivative or 'second hand' as one might think: they might use the ominous, growled vocals redolent of Autopsy and Incantation, and some of the muddier and haunted resolution of Finnish pioneers like Demigod, but they apply a particular atmosphere to them that keeps the music creepy throughout. They might also utilize that driven, voluptuous Swedish guitar tone so commonly aped from the early 90s, but they use it more as a broth to season and saturate their ideas rather than a vehicle for riff lifting from Entombed and Dismember.

And ideas they have: from the eerie, saddening pulchritude of the clean guitar instrumental "Into the Psychomanteum" (or the later intro to "Crepuscular Transcendence"), to the fits of melodic tapping and other lead techniques that seem to arrive out of left field ("Eminence...", etc) against the enormous, dominant grinding of the rhythm guitar. Binah, so named from kabbalistic philosophy, implement the dynamic skills of seasoned travelers into the darker wastes of the psyche through dramatic tempo shifting and pure, unadulterated horror. The result is that the listener feels as if he or she is some unfortunate asylum inmate where it turns out that the warden is also an occultist who has just opened the gates to the Abyss, and as payment has offered up the souls of his patients in return for a grotesque immortality. Tracks like "Absorption Into the Unearthly" and "Eminence of the Sombre" will churn your spirit to paste with their manifold blasts and grooves, each sauced in the loud and primitive density of that weighted guitar tone.

Perhaps my favorite single element to this album is the growl, which is incredibly bleak and full and left to resonate over the busier undercurrent of guitars like some subterranean slavemaster traumatizing his flock. It's simply mortifying, even when the riven rhythm sequences and the tactile drums are performing the less interesting of the riffs. In truth, I didn't feel like there were a lot of catchier note progressions outside of the leads. Binah seems to have such an intense focus on production and atmosphere that the songs do tend to fall by the wayside, but then I could say the same for most of the group's peers pursuing this same path. In the end, ironically, it is this very specialization that itself burns Hallucinating in Resurrecture into the bowels of memory. This is hellish, disturbing music which admires its genre fathers from fathoms beneath the earth, enough distance that the vast and tenebrous scope of its production pays off in nightmares. Fans of Sonne Adam, Necrovation, Ignivomous, Disma, Incantation, and of course the Finnish/Swedish revival will likely want to add this album to their wish lists. Just turn off the crush control, and wallow in the fear.

Verdict: Win [8/10]

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