Decimation - Reign of Ungodly Creation (2014)

It's a slick touch to kick off the third Decimation full-length with that mono sequence, because when the stereo brutality arrives, you are likely to experience the most fulfilling moment of the entire album. Not because the rest of it is bad, by any means, but on the whole, Reign of Ungodly Creation very rapidly escalates (or, if you're not into tech/brutal death metal, deteriorates) into one of those records which feels like so much focus is put into its aural presentation as a series of workouts or exercises, rather than a bastion of effective songwriting. Like so many albums of its niche, it is content merely to beat on you relentlessly, but without leaving much of a bruise beneath the surface of the listener's emotions. It will mug you on the street, steal your wallet and bus pass, sure...but not keep you up at night haunted by what you've just heard...

Partially this is due to the large amount of derivation gone into this: the taut, violent death thrashing of the faster-than-mid-paced picking progressions is redolent of Cannibal Corpse in a frenzy. The clinical intricacies play out like a hybrid of Suffocation and ancient Pestilence, and you can season the rest with a lot of Morbid Angel and Deicide influence filtered through a Deeds of Flesh lens. None of that renders the album insubstantial, inefficient or unlistenable, because those are usually considered the 'right' inspirations going into an onslaught like this, but it just doesn't seem that Decimation is ever interested in taking them further or elsewhere, and when it comes down to the raw value of riff composition, most of the 37 minutes of material seems more reliant on form and function above poignancy. It's surely abusive on the limbs and joints of the guitarist's hands, and the drummers entire body, but no matter how busy the riffing gets, so few of the note patterns ascend into anything truly compelling, beyond the few segments where they play the more atmospheric and dissonant chords (often at the beginning of the tunes). The bass is peppy and hectic to collude with the rhythm note placements, but I wish it had a little more body to it, because it might help offset how the album sounded like a scalpel being repeatedly stabbed into plastic and not flesh. The vocals are exactly what you think they will be: incessant gutturals, unforgiving, but simultaneously average.
 
Lyrically, this is highbrow mystical stuff with wordy song titles like "Psalm Carnage in the Ghoulish Chapel of Gehenna" or "Aberrant Ablution by Filthy Excrements of a Grotesque Crassamentum", and this pseudo-pretentiousness makes it a little hard to discern whether or not Decimation takes this seriously at all or if they're just taking the piss on us. It's like a bookworm's alternate reality spin on the first Morbid Angel album. Musically, though, it's all mechanics...the mechanics of brutality, without the flavor or the personality of the hideous imagery and rock-bottom human depravity that inspired such a genre to form in the first place. The Dan Seagrave cover on this thing is fucking stunning, one of the coolest I've seen all year, but again we've got an instance where the artwork inspires us to think of these ominous, cyclopean dimensions of fear and majesty, and the music itself seems far too grounded into the surgical ward which mass produces a lot of bands with the same sound. You want to enter that otherworldly reality depicted there, with alien beings floating around a horizon of imposing castle towers lifted free of their gravitational anchors, but you get nowhere close.

I don't mean to come down too hard on Reign of Ungodly Creation, because it is clearly a kinetic and competent afternoon spent at the death metal gymnastics, but apart from a few moments in songs like "Mystic Transformation in Encrypted Scrolls of a Grievous Sermon" and "Psalm Carnage..." where the dynamics occasionally hint at something far more frightening, I just felt like the album was running cycles in a hamster wheel or performing endless calisthenics and repetitious lifting regimens, and it never really capitalized on what these musicians are obviously capable of if they just took a few more minutes to analyze what made their own inspirations so damn cool. I've enjoyed albums in this wheelhouse before. I mean, there is a place for stuff like this, and it lives up to those crucial brutal and technical expectations that its targets audience needs to check off the list, dotting its i's and crossing it's. Yet a little more experimentation, a slightly altered angle/vector of approach, and in some cases, measured restraint could go a long, long way for a group like Decimation.

Verdict: Indifference [6.75/10]

https://www.facebook.com/DecimationTR

Sacrocurse - Unholier Master (2014)

Punishment is the design of this international 2-piece collaboration, and punishment is perhaps the one musical region in which it does succeed. Unholier Master attempts to reach the epitome of raw, flesh ripping black/death hybridization through a formula that unfortunately opines for the overuse of a blast beat which can very quickly grow monotonous with nothing interesting happening over it. I'm not questioning the skill of this skin-beater, he's an absolute fucking maniac and incorporates a lot of clamorous crashing and even handles the death/thrashing breakdowns well, which often lend the music a bit of an Altars of Madness-era frenetic aesthetic, but like a lot of infernal war metal, it very often doesn't resonate.

Bass-lines are full-throttle abysmal muddiness, and guitar patterns so forceful and fast that they often become lost alongside the beats and the ominous, sustained growling which represents the vocalist. It's not that the guitars aren't busy, per se, but they rely a lot on pretty standard deathgrind or hyper black metal chord progressions which are performed in such a flurry that there is little emphasis on them being inherently memorable to begin with. At times, this feels like Blasphemy, Repulsion and Bestial Warlust pooled their collective hatred into a single, frothing mass of hell-flumes and chose simply to annihilate everything in their shared path with utter speed and disgust. Frivolous lead guitar frenzies flying all over the atmosphere, lightning fuck bass guitars which are played with the same level of intensity as the rhythm guitars, and a living NASCAR rally on the drum kit. My problem here is just that once I've heard one or two songs I feel like I've heard them all...they break it all up once in awhile, just not enough for my attention to become consistent.

Don't get me wrong, on some level I admire this sort of utter 'fuck off' attitude which courses through the album like burning blood, and in the past there are a few insane albums like this which I have held dear, but other than its pure, violent and visceral atmosphere I never discovered anything here I wanted to hold on to. If someone were flipping through my records and asked me for something sick and headache-inducing, I'd break out Unholier Master in a second. It's THAT relentless, THAT brutal and uncompromising, and it hates your guts, but the only real evil lies in its indiscriminate sense of aggression. All that said, there is a place for this stuff, and a number of individuals will worship the fuck out of its outrageous aural nihilism. This is the stuff I imagine would be played when various domains of Hell lay siege upon one another, the damned crushing the damned in an endless cycle of chaos which can never be broken. Wanna hear that? Then you'll wanna hear this. But check your desire for subtlety at the door, because Sacrocurse will not brook that foolishness.

Verdict: Indifference [6.75/10]

https://www.facebook.com/Sacrocurse

Viranesir - Fountain of Uncertainty (2013)

With its phallic cover image and cleverly relevant album title (don't we know it, males), and a track list that reads like a chronological overview of the reproductive cycle, Fountain of Uncertainty is quite a rare bird that I've received for the blog. In fact, what makes the album even more unusual is that it's the soundtrack to a short Turkish film, Drink from the Fountain of Uncertainty, which examines the life and relationships of a musician in the Adana-Mersin provincial area, and it's quite fascinating just how the lyrics for each of the pieces matches up to the themes of alienation, subcultural isolation and so forth while still having that duality of purpose to remain an abstraction for the sexual process hinted at. But even cooler, what surprised me was just how well the ambient textures and drudging, evil black metal guitar aesthetics actually function alongside the clips of the film that I've actually seen.

This isn't Emir Toğrul's first dance with this particular admixture of ingredients, having released several albums as Yayla, but Fountain of Uncertainty is the most visionary and compelling of his works that I've come across yet. An oft times chilling, oft times majestic affirmation of the qualities once manifest in the music of an artist like Burzum or Abruptum, only cast in a more urbane, post-everything mold. Distant and cacophonous, wailing vocals hover just at the edge of perception alongside the dreamy, crude synthesizers (think early M83) and rasping guitar lines, while the drum programming thunders just loud enough that you realize there is a beat mooring the music. However, there is quite a variation in the structure of these five pieces: "Stark of Dark", for example, is a roiling marriage of molten, fuzzed out bass tones with eerie layered synthesizers, while the album's 12+ minute centerpiece, "Ejaculation" is a more jarring, progressive piece with some staccato and flooded chords, and overall the most guitar-oriented, and the closer "Fertilization" makes the best use of the snarled, decaying black metal vocal style.

Whether vocally or instrumentally, though, the album is equally engaging, with a distant and murky mix that feels like its clamoring off the crumbling walls of an inner city, only to transcend the building-tops and escape off into a dingy night sky. The caveat is, while Emir exhibits a lot of control here on the shorter instrumental tunes ("Stark of Dark", "Sight of Light"), Fountain of Uncertainty is not an album that will sate anyone who seeks the norm. Architecture, percussion, verse/chorus conventions are at best, loosely defined, and the totality of the 30 minute experience plays far more like a dark ambient experimentation than a heavily metal infused monument. There is no shortage of sounds or textures, but Toğrul leaves plenty up to the imagination, especially when one is listening through this independent of the film. That said, I found that the music worked in both situations, as ancillary tension and warmth to the story, and as a background piece one can insert into the turmoils and victories of one's own existence.

It's not perfect, and I would actually not have minded a broader palette of sounds and instruments here, but it IS consistent in quality, and has enough conviction to really swallow the imagination while it lasts. A well rationed, well executed proof of its concept. Recommended if you're seeking out a more loose, surreal, urban alternative to Filosofem, Darkspace, or that intriguing, obscure Alpha Drone s/t out of Germany.

Verdict: Win [7.75/10]

http://merdumgiriz.org/

Yayla - Sathimasal (2012)

Balancing ambient and black metal aesthetics against one another efficiently is not as easy as it might sound, but it's this very coupling which saves Yayla's sophomore Sathimasal from becoming what might otherwise prove a relatively average blast off into the bowels of this super saturated genre. On the surface, this is a one man act from Turkey, with Emir Togrul performing all instruments and ominous vocals. He's created a clamor of sodden death and decay here which fully soaks the listener into its cavernous and oft chaotic disposition. Deeper and darker albums than this one are seldom experienced, but those not in the mood for dipping their heads into its churning, volatile ichor would be best avoiding it, because despite the tranquil transitions speckling its onslaught, this is neither subtle nor accessible by any stretch of the imagination.

As if to prime the audience directly for the ensuing punishment, Sathimasal opens with a 7+ minute rush of blasted instrumentality called "Fordreame Wonderlore". This is a long way to go without a structural change, yet it maintains its tempo with confidence while the synthesizers play off against the writhing, incendiary burst of early 90s Mayhem-like tremolo chords. Thankfully, the other four tracks, which are all considerably longer in duration, feature a wider dynamic. "Emperor; Elegy to Wars Never Fought" intersperses its own blasting with a delightful ambient/synth break seeped in angelic, shimmering choirs; or churns into a slower, molten groove above which Emir's vocals feel like disembodied spirits haunting a subterranean cathedral. "Conjurer; Prophetillars Will Hollow" has higher pitched riffing, tolling bell tones and a brighter rasp that seems to tear at its structure like a hell hound pawing and tearing at blood-tinted curtains. But my favorite track here was the nigh on 140minute closer, "Will to Walk Paths to No Temple" which almost felt like an underground alternative to Summoning, not only for the title but for how it moaning its obscurity over the broken beat, a current of dense and deadly sadness.

Sathimasal does often run into problems with its sense of overwhelming repetition, especially in the faster drum sequences, but this is hardly a unique issue to Yayla. A bit more variation would not hurt this music, in fact it would seem welcome in its expansive, hostile atmosphere. That said, I had an even greater issue with the production. It seems far too level, and as a result the vocals, which are distant to begin with, often find themselves too lost under the weight of the riffs and the savagery of the blasting, or the denseness of the keys. Perhaps if they were panned more, or if the voice itself was more eclectic in its percussive meter, it would become more prominent. Beyond these issues, Sathimasal delivers what it promises, a bleak and unnervingly drowning trip into the muted red arches of horror implied by its cover image. Try and envision a blacker, hyper interpretation of the ominous, resonant death of bands like Embrace of Thorns, Vasaeleth, or Mitochondrion only with a cavernous aesthetic and submerged keyboard eloquence not unlike the Australian project The Crevices Below; nearly always on the attack.

Verdict: Win [7/10]

http://merdumgiriz.org/Yayla_Official.html

Heretic Soul - Born Into This Plague (2010)

Turkish metal has always fascinated me, as I attended University with a friend from the country who got me into the band known there as Pentagram (Mezarkabul elsewhere), but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of coverage in the more extreme field of death metal. I'm aware of the band Cenotaph, listened to a few of their albums, and thought they were decent, but outside of this, Heretic Soul is one of my few exposures. Born Into This Plague is the band's debut, issued through Chicago's Rotting Corpse Records to follow up their Life Becomes Our Grave EP (2008), and though it shows some potential, it suffers from a few issues that mire it down into relative mediocrity. The band is brutal and attempts to capture an array of dynamics within their music, but some of them feel all too familiar and there is just not enough worthwhile riffing to push them over the top.

There is no single vantage point for which to compare this artist. They seem to have a penchant for the grooves and squeals common to brutal USDM bands, and even sprinkle in a few simplistic chugged breakdowns, but they also have a faster, blasted side which carries more of a Morbid Angel or early Suffocation influence, so most of the bases are covered. They are not the most technically endowed band, opting instead for straight up brutality conceived through primordial writing, and there would be nothing wrong with this, only that there seems to be a dearth of truly compelling riffs manifested across the album. The initial track, "The Truth Dwells In Your Head", is not the strongest, opening with a brief volley of blasted, old school rhythms that dives into a typical chug/squeal breakdown that was used up by the mid 90s. Later in the song is another series of open mute chugs that really could have been opted out for something better, and in all, its very underwhelming. Not a best foot forward scenario.

The album tries to clean up after itself with the following "Deadliest Enemy", a blasted slab of murder wrought from the inspiration of USDM like Malevolent Creation, Suffocation, Diabolic and other East Coast criminals. The first breakdown in this song is a little better, with some clean notes dragging up the tail end to make it feel less frivolous. I was not engaged by the melodic bridge, and unfortunately there's another chugged breakdown near the end which feels like something Earth Crisis or Hatebreed would have written many a moon ago. "Mental Decay" is far stronger, with some harmonic saber rattling over the intro riff and then a big, Sepultura-like groove ala Chaos A.D. before they pick up speed. I especially enjoyed the riffing later in the song, which created a huge atmosphere over the growls, and reminded me of Bolt Thrower. Not a single, shitty breakdown found here, and thus it's easily superior to the first two tracks.

"Suffering From Existence" maintains a warlike pacing with a mix of rolled double-bass tank segments and blasted bits, with a better breakdown that makes good use of the drummer. "Faceless" ranges from thunder to thrash, to war metal and back to thunder and thrash, with only a menial breakdown; "Worship Me" is another mix of Sepultura/Bolt Thrower; "Beyond Hatred" is introduced through some clean guitars and moody atmosphere before transforming into a solemn, melodic floe over hammering mid-blasts; and both "Life Becomes Our Grave" and "Twenty One Grams" combine some reasonable grooved walls of chords with disposable breakdowns.

Born Into this Plague never truly escapes the low expectations it sets up for itself, and that's a shame, because there is clearly some passion for old school, 90s extremity at work. There are a few good riffs scattered throughout, but even these could use some further gestation to increase their ear candy resonance. The vocals are nothing out of the ordinary, and the compositions do not set up any impressive musicianship due to its primitive, mosh-fueled nature. There are points at which the album captures to great old vibes of Bolt Thrower, Morbid Angel, Malevolent Creation, Incantation and a number of other bands, but it does nothing to vault itself into their unhallowed company. There's nothing grating or 'wrong' with Heretic Soul, aside from the use of a few cheap and unimaginative breakdowns, but an added element of intricacy would go a long way towards helping them identify against the endless legions of other bands out there.

Verdict: Indifference [5.75/10]

http://www.hereticsoul.net/

The Sarcophagus - Towards the Eternal Chaos (2009)

The Sarcophagus is a Turkish black metal band with several members of the band Raven Woods, and in this form have existed for over a decade now, only getting around to their debut full-length last year. They've made a wise decision to recruit the infamous Kvarforth as a session singer for their recordings, and I have to admit, while I am oft critical of the man's attitude, his performance here is nothing short of phenomenal, on par with any of his better releases through his mainstay Shining. The guy just lets loose here, with a maddening, manly rough edge to his tone that would probably shave the stubble off your chin if you could package it to accessorize your favorite razor.

The band plays in an ever charging style of melodic black which is made bolder than it should by both the vocals and the raw, echoing atmosphere it is recorded in. It's both carnal and strangely soothing, and though the riffs individually do not often impress, their marriage with the shadowy, mountainous tones provides an unmistakable journey, which is the ideal for any black metal effort. The Sarcophagus will transport you somewhere, whether it's the desolate summit of an earthen spire or the deepest, dankest dungeon in which you await your execution. In just under 50 minutes and 10 tracks of such execution, the band has gone from off the radar completely to perhaps Turkey's very best black metal artist, and their signing with Osmose Productions ensures that the message get out beyond the normal barriers.

The title track is a haunting intro piece which swells with a dark, medieval ambience curried through violins, xylophone and a martial escalation of sweeping orchestration that blows up directly into "Legend Sleeps Behind the Mountains", and you are cast straight into the band's vision of desperation and ancient, yet not forgotten passion for history. The riffs cascade like a flow of falling rock as it crashes into a river beneath, and each lyrical jab is like a mad heretic screaming forth from a cliffside as he sends his pet ravens to pluck out your eyes. The onslaught persists through most of the album's tracks, notables including "Hymn to Awakening", or "Age of Demons" with its Hellhammer-ing, Bathory breakdown. The vocals are fucking insane on that last track, alone making it worthwhile. The slower chagrin of the band's namesake "The Sarcophagus" is also quite excellent, as is the surging melancholy of "Anatolian Dragons". Yet no track on this album will allow your escape from its atmospheric wonders, and Kvarforth lives up to, no, surpasses his hype here.

Towards the Eternal Chaos is another great black metal album for a year already loaded to the teeth with unforgettable works, and though it does not yet reek of perfection, it's certainly a force for excitement in the Turkish scene, for I haven't gotten this riled up over a Turk metal band since Mezarkabul. Well worth tracking down, whether you appreciate this singer's other bands or just a good swift ass kicking loyal to the forefathers of the genre.

Highlights: Legend Sleeps Behind the Mountains, Hymn to Awakening, Age of Demons, Anatolian Dragons

Verdict: Win [8.5/10]

http://www.myspace.com/thesarcophagus

Baht - Resurgence Hour [DEMO] (2009)

I hear very few newer bands from Turkey these days, and perhaps that is my own fault, but I am glad to having stumbled across this new 2-track demo from Baht. The style at work here is an interesting one, if you can picture bands like Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal simplified into a flowing mass of old school death metal with some melody to it and a slight touch of progression.

"Dead Conceit" consists of a stream of thick, immersive chords that do possess a hint of grooving below the gruff, full gutturals of Bilgehan Engin. I really enjoyed the guitar tones, and even though the riffing isn't technical, it somehow has that mezmerizing simplicity of a band like Vader. The middle of the track is interesting, with echoed voices over a great pattern of repeating notes that eventually picks back up the pace. "Sacred Enigma" fits like a glove, with a slower, punching rhythm laden in mystical melodies. Once again, the song breaks for some clean voices, this time accented with some acoustics and a fine progressive metal riff, before really breaking down into an interchange with the clean guitars, bass and percussion.

Not much more I can offer here. Resurgence Hour is but two tracks, but they are good tracks and a full-length of such material would be welcome indeed. Check the songs out and let the band know what you think.

Verdict: Win [7/10]

http://baht-tr.com/