Beats and yelling: Heruvim

Mercator
Out 12^th September on Redefining Darkness Records

Heruvim locate the carefree bounce of Pestilence circa ‘Spheres’ within the dark chasmic setting of modern death metal, flattening off progressive nuance in favour of creating something more accessible from the raw material. Demilichian chromaticism is recruited as binding material, linking the progressive allusions with the nihilism of modern death metal, upgrading it from its current futility into a place of pragmatism. Through this stitching together of the old and the new comes an oddly positive, active statement that captures the substance and purpose of the genre in its heyday.

Prima facie this album behaves much like any garden variety old school fodder. The production is soft and warm, emphasising the artist’s need to convey authenticity, achieved through an organic mix. The fuzzy guitar tone conveys a sense of clarity through jagged, high end riffs that arise violently from the dirge of swampy, low end droning. Crisp, clear drums sit neatly within this naturalism but cut through with vigour, tightly framing the choppy shifts in tempo and the angular, multi-dimensional riffing just as they drive home the more straightforward mid-paced marches lifted directly from the book of Bolt Thrower. Mid-range, reverb drenched vocals complete the picture, adding a muscular throughline of imposing malevolence that cuts through the otherwise straight faced ambiguity of the music itself.

What makes ‘Mercator’ stand apart from aesthetically equivalent efforts is a sense of balance. Specifically between a playful surrealism born of sharp micro-refrains that compound on one another throughout the course of a track, juxtaposed against the despondence of doom passages, the latter of which are often pitched where a solo would normally fall. Simple, clean harmonic material accents these segments, opening out of the mix with rich ambience, thus making explicit the sense of scale that was previously merely implied.

There is a clear contrast of moods carried throughout this music. Between a subterranean darkness, an active mid-range of uncanny motion, and explosions of anomic chaos as the music splits itself apart only to rebuild to a place of greater solidity. Despite the frequent churn and rearrangement of material throughout, Heruvim never squander their momentum, transferring energy and themes from one passage to the next, thus crafting a supervenient unity atop the apparent disorder. Although the music is constantly buffeted by an atonal physicality, one is left with an overarching impression of illogical tragedy, a mournful, lamentation rendered all the more impactful for its latent weird and eerie riff signatures.