The Pit: Of Madness and Evil Whispers
Out 14th July on Personal Records
A mere fifteen years after their debut ‘Disrupted Human Symmetry’, Mexico’s The Pit strike fourth with new full length material in ‘Of Madness and Evil Whispers’. Offering a slick blend of mud slinging doom ridden death metal and regal melodicism, this album overcomes its modest presentation with a diverse package of characterful riffing and a novel integration of influences.
The production is filthy but retains the solidity necessary to bring The Pit’s tight rendition of classicalist death metal to bear. Drums adopt a slick, old school syntheticism, championing efficiency of execution by removing any decay from the snare and toms, allowing full transparency into the simple yet effective rhythmic interplay. Guitars are equally austere. Although driven by the dirt of a bass orientated tone, clarity and articulation is retained in order to give full voice to the distinctive melodic character on display and its frequent interchanges with the atonal chaos of the rhythm section below. Vocals adopt a mid-range, hardcore punk infused bark, displaying a degree of passion and melodrama more common to blackened doom than the calculating malevolence of pure death metal.
Such a bare-bones presentation allows The Pit to foreground their enthusiasm for death metal as the art of thematic architecture, one that harnesses musical chaos as a source of power, whilst never allowing this impetus to dissolve the music into structureless sludge. They occasionally flex their doom muscles, with all the atmospheric undertones this implies. But this is never allowed to wrest the taut unfolding of frantic conflict at the heart of this album. Atonality is incrementality evolved into brief chromatic exchanges, which are in turn used as a platform for extending confident harmonic lead material to function as central refrains for each piece. Brief guitar solos serve as commentary on this rigid compositional debate, granting room for spontaneity as much as a link between the central formalistic backbone.
‘Of Madness and Evil Whispers’ is a superficially modest offering within the context of the modern death metal canon. The packaging and delivery deliberately avoids reaching for the top shelf in terms of presenting a distinct identity, instead preferring to create room for a fully formed conversation between death metal’s emotive core and the mechanistic underbelly of raw power to be utilised. For this reason it is infinitely more engaging than overtly big budget productions with cavernous mixes and meandering washes of dark ambience, which are often deployed to supplement lack of content. The Pit, by contrast, offer an array of densely packed information ordered in sequences as logical as they are unexpectedly novel.
Maurda: Cultus Brachypter
Out 11th November (2022) on Cirsium Kollektivet
Maurda are that rare entity in the murky territory of grind infused black metal (or war metal); an artist capable of articulating a melodic character. Not only that, but the much maligned monotony of this subgenre is further circumvented by some well placed vocal eccentricity, supplementing the obscurantist guttural growls with impassioned clean tones that speak of performance art more than they do the metallic aural tradition.
‘Cultus Brachypter’ is a brief EP. Although the riffs take on the aesthetic character of black metal, one that walks the borders between refined melodicism and primal rage, structurally, the brevity has more in common with classic grindcore. These are hints and suggestions more than they are fully fledged compositions. But far from this being a disparagement, Maurda manage to convey more complexity and intrigue via these briefly aggressive note clusters than many do on extended sonic ruminations.
Simple punk interchanges are collided against the flowing, tremolo blasts of traditional black metal, with the tempos kept at the upper echelon of speed. This latter point allows Maurda to force a flowing cacophony of information at the listener, a dense but not overwhelming delivery mechanism for experimentally minded extreme metal. This also leaves room for the intensity to be maintained from start to finish across ‘Cultus Brachypter’ without devolving into monotony.
This EP achieves the perfect balance between rigorous compositional character, efficiency, and idiosyncratic flourishes without devolving into farce. A diverse and oddly unpredictable entity despite its all too brief runtime.
Burgûli: Odi Des De La Fi Del Món
Out 7th July on WormHoleDeath Records
Just when you thought you had plumbed the spitefully combative sonic depths of the lo-fi/raw black metal milieu, another release comes along that once again dramatically shifts one’s frame of reference. The latest EP from Spain’s Burgûli – a terminally-to-the-point-of-parody bedroom bound black metal project – pushes the limits of credulity in everything from musicianship, composition, production, and gut wrenching sincerity. Think Yamatu, VON, or Mutiilation, but with – if possible – sloppier musicianship, more abrasive production values, and…shall we say a more challenging relationship with the art of minimalism.
This music pitches itself at the point where any metallic DNA is flushed from the system, leaving either a work of avant-garde noise genius, or the clumsiest attempt to reap a creative harvest from the fertile atmospheres of obscure black metal imaginable. Drums are a background pulse of flat snare rolls. But even that is a charitable description, because pulses tend to flow in reliable intervals, a feature completely AWOL here. The time keeping makes early Judas Iscariot look like a well oiled machine of rhythmic precision. Equally, the slow tremolo picked guitar is so pronounced that it becomes a percussive instrument in itself, but one that completely fails to link up with the drums in any recognisable pattern. The result is akin to standing in a corridor between two practice rooms, listening to two entirely different bands rehearse, with any connection between the resulting cacophony being purely incidental.
A second “lead” guitar line occasionally joins the fray, and at least makes a show of linking harmonically and rhythmically with its accompaniment. But as far as enriching the musical offering, aside from embiggening the sound somewhat, from a creative perspective there is very little of note occurring. The most basic mournful threnodies are eked out with little to no variation over the course of some pretty lengthy tracks. At times the effect is almost improvisational. This in itself is not a detriment. It’s just that when a musician chooses to lean on this technique, not knowing where the music may be going, it’s important that it at least goes somewhere, which is more than can be said for these limited, cyclical meanderings around the same basket of rudiments. Vocals are a near random stream of high pitched ejaculations, with no musical content to their name, they serve the simple purpose of cluttering the mix with aural trauma.
Burgûli calls itself atmospheric black metal, which is true in the literal if not the common sense understanding of the phrase. There is atmosphere here. Confusion, ache, strain, humour, despair. But whether these are the intended effects remains unfathomable. For listeners that specialise in black metal as the art of successfully failing to achieve its creative intent, ‘Odi Des De La Fi Del Món’ is nothing short of an embarrassment of riches. But anyone outside of this small clique had best steer well clear of this one. The possibility remains that we are simply being mocked, yet it is equally possible that a masochistic part of us enjoys the experience regardless.
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