Beats and yelling: Ripper

Towards Rebirth
Out 24^th July on Dark Descent Records

With its roots in Merciless or Massacra, but growing branches out to death metal with a more developed melodic palette comes the latest album from Chile’s Ripper. A stylistically far reaching effort that’s nevertheless delivered in a tight package of neatly arranged riff pockets. Dense but traditionally anthemic thrash vocals are complicated by darkly moralistic death metal accents, the choppy chromaticism of death/thrash acting as antagonist to the main thread. Verse refrains mirror traditional hardcore punk by shifting pitch without changing tempo or phrasing, thus allowing Ripper to accelerate the intensity whilst keeping their powder dry for developmental material. In this sense, drums offer a relatively minimalist package that proves to be the right fit for this music. Patterns are kept simple, allowing the percussive qualities of the guitars to guide the rhythmic flow. Equally, fills are kept to brief disorientating shuffles to mark the accrual of surplus activity.

The production is chunkier than is typical for this style. The guitar tone more fitting of stripped back death metal than the highspeed runs delivered across this album. But the mix is accommodating enough to allow for the biproduct of surplus inertia this creates. Despite the density and choppy flow, clarity is retained. For the drums, as it is with their performance, so it is with the levels, which are kept relatively low, playing the role of hype man to the guitars as opposed to an independent lever working its influence on the music. Given the sheer freneticism with which ideas breeze by this is the correct choice. Mid-range death vocals with moderate reverb slide neatly into this picture, when not delivering frantic passages rich in lyrical information they adopt a call and response stance with the lead guitars.

With this album, Ripper prove themselves adept at taking an older style and updating it into a modern context. The raw primitivism of early death metal which took the majority of its language from speed metal forms the backbone, but this is intercut by nods to later developments, to the point where ‘Towards Rebirth’ could function as the story of the borders between death and thrash told through a history of riffs. But atop this sits an additional module of refined melodicism, an account told most explicitly through the expressive guitar leads, but also in many of the riffs, and indeed intriguing moments like the brief bass interlude that emerges on ‘The Source Exterminator’. The result is an onion of an album, one that allows the listener to peel back its multiple layers as they see fit, discovering new angles and corners as the music gradually unfurls in multiple deviations, all guided by a singular meta direction working atop the rich yet subtly woven stylistic alchemy.