Beats and yelling: Sněť

V bažinách vědomí
Out 10^th September on Me Saco Un Ojo / Dark Descent Records

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Czechia’s Sněť deliver on the second album. The upgrades to the debut may be modest given the five year gap, most notably some cosmetic tweaks and slicker production values, but it’s enough to re-announce this entity to the underground, a force for honest, down the barrel death metal values. Drab is the presentation and drab is the design. For all the muscular speed runs, Sněť appear at their most comfortable when sitting back into chugging, mid-paced marches of surrealist funereal intent. Incantation may be an obvious reference point, but this music owes more to early Finnish death metal in Demigod or Depravity and of course the background guiding philosophy of Bolt Thrower.

The production feels refreshing. Drawn from the soft organicism of the 90s but not beholden to it. The mix is wide but not unfocused, allowing the music to flex its considerable muscle without devolving into monotonous caverncore dirge. Chunky guitars dominate, offering a tone in keeping with the lineage of death metal but one that would have been near impossible to achieve on the budgets of the pre-2000 underground. It retains clarity during the faster passages, but makes its presence most known via riffs that briefly wander up the fretboard, as if issuing ominous injunctions before submerging back to the low end. Bass naturally undergirds this barrage, binding all together with galloping Jo Bench-esque sequences. Drums may be a little too bassy for their own good, meaning the performance is felt more than consciously ingested, but the subtle framing devices shine through regardless. A final seasoning of vicious guttural vocals to serve, and the tools are finally ready to convey their oddly modernist nightmarish visions.

This is where the real advance on the debut, and indeed on much death metal of this oeuvre, is to be found within ‘V bažinách vědomí’. On paper this is straightforward chugging death metal with the occasional relapse into doom. But each track is rife with uncanny accents, discordant lead refrains, and a sense of escalating tension that leaves one feeling oddly unsettled by the close. It goes beyond stock horror tropes, boring into the psyche with lackadaisical persistence. This is achieved most obviously through the contrast of the energetic and relatively straightforward speed runs with frequent breaks into plodding, meandering material drawn directly from the book of Demilich or Adramelech. It’s a juxtaposition that leads one into a false sense of security, only for these peripheral alien sensations to continuously reemerge, grinding down the psychological defences by a thousand cuts.

With each listen it becomes clearer that ‘V bažinách vědomí’ is a step in the right direction for Sněť. What at first glance looks like a simple facelift on earlier material gradually unfurls into a work of mischievous and lightly subversive death metal. One that has many delights to offer for anyone simply looking to scratch an ich for that squelchy mid-paced pageantry, but beneath the veneer a cornucopia of off kilter alleyways is on offer for anyone craving duality of meaning within their death metal.