Triumvir Foul – Urine of Abomination

February 2019 – Vrasubatlat/Invictus Productions

Two years after the stellar Spiritual Bloodshed, Triumvir Foul are back with the Urine of Abomination EP, a noisy, chaotic, primitive record that's satisfyingly predictable and predictably satisfying. Sharing a member with Dagger Lust, for whom the best descriptor I could come up with would be noisened death metal, it comes as no surprise that every entry this EP writes in the book of death metal is surrounded by slabs of warm, almost comforting harsh noise sections.

Reminiscent of Azarath, the vocals have a raw, primitive rasp, fitting the caveman aspect curated by similar cavernous death metal bands. Raw and primitive also describe every other aspect of the record – some leads are literal three-note tapping sections, and the rhythm section is filled with hammer blasts and other similar beats that I'd assume were first played during mammoth hunts. The songwriting is where the predictability comes in, yet it's predictable in the best of ways – breaking into a tremolo-picked section, a breakdown or a screaming lead happens exactly when it should, playing straight into the tropes of the genre. Pick scrapes and slides give every riff an organic, living feel – the guitars are alive, and they're bellowing threats. This is what death metal sounds like when you're writing it at the advent of an ice-age, where obscure scales and sweep picking are foregone in favour of testosterone-driven riffs, and where technique is only a means to an end, which in this case is opening a large enough portal to Hell that the incoming ice sheets are melted away.

While Vrasubatlat put out the cassette and digital releases, Invictus Productions were granted the opportunity to do the CD and vinyl versions, the cover of which is representative of the kind of caveman who bore the genes of Triumvir Foul so many millennia ago – ugly, rotting, malformed and standing in a pool of his own urine. The right panel with only a logo and title in simple font has a similar aesthetic to some harsh noise and punk artists, a direction Triumvir Foul have pushed towards with great success given their mix of death metal brio and noise/punk disdain for impure detail.

Comments

Grime - Live

Grime Live – Oct. 2017 The air is heavy, the lights are dim, and the conversations skittle away, hiding in the corners as Grime takes to the stage. Eyes up and hair down, I knew we were in for something good. Grime, the italian sludge act, released their first album in 2013 on the well-known Mordgrimm records. They might be the best-named band I can think of – the unclean buzz of the strings and damp mix of instruments give off a filthy, pock-marked sound, the kind you'd hear from scraping a sewer floor. I didn't know of them until their 2015 record, Circle of Molesters, but they're the kind of band who can do no wrong. The first note hit, and the bass shook me in unholy ways. After staggering a few steps back, I looked up at the stage and saw some of the best lighting since Messuggah. A white backdrop, searchlight-style movement carving the silhouettes of Grime into my retina. Marco, lead guitar, was spectacular in his theatrics. Doubling over in rage and p...

Analepsy – Atrocities from Beyond

When I say slam, people usually think of the Russian scene, often citing ultra-heavyweights Abominable Putridity. Well, it turns out Portugal is also amazing at mid-tempo grooving. Their first release, Dehumanization by Supremacy, was an exceptional debut from any point of view. The production was spot-on, the songs had great flow, and the slams were goddamn heavy. The vocals were arguably the least impressive, mainly because there was so little variety – which is something given that we’re talking about brutal death metal here. On Atrocities from Beyond, the man behind the mic is replaced by the lead guitarist, Diogo Santana, and this man’s range is far superior – there are some nice mid-ranged growls mixed and that really give the gutturals punch by contrast. They’ve hired backup on a couple of songs, including the legendary Larry Wang from Coprocephalic, who’s always a welcome addition to any album. It’s great to hear how the songwriting grew between the two records. The first ...

Uboa, the interview

UG You’ve gone over the “Jouissance” title in the past. Would you mind going over Coma Wall? It’s got quite grave and final undertones. First, Coma Wall has no totalised meaning for me, but death of the author could suggest otherwise. But there are themes. The Coma Wall, also known as the CfA2 Great Wall, is a galactic filament - thread-like structures composed millions of galaxies - of and one of the largest structures in the observable universe. It’s 750 million ly high x 200 million ly in width x 16 million ly in thickness. There are few structures bigger than it before you get to the “End of Greatness”, where the universe no longer is seen in discernible structures (filaments and voids, which combined look awfully organic, almost like clusters of interconnected neurones) and you get undifferentiated noise, like static on a TV or white noise. Basically, in cosmology, there seems to be an upper limit to how big things get before the universe seems to become pure undifferentia...

Undergrind Metal

Search This Blog