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.

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