AN NCS PREMIERE: NAR MATTARU — “THE END OF THE BEGINNING”

 

When I first encountered the music of Chile’s Nar Mattaru back in February 2014, I was already late to the party. I had missed the band’s first album, 2011’s Eluma Elish, but the song I heard (now more than 18 months ago) really made a deep impression. That track (reviewed here) was “Funeral In Abzu”, and it was due to appear on the band’s second album Ancient Atomic Warfare. And then, almost one year later, I discovered a second advance track from the album, a monstrous nuclear firestorm called “Declaration of Supremacy” (discussed here). Where, I wondered, was the rest of this album?

Well, at long last, the wait is nearly over — because I, Voidhanger Records has now revealed that Ancient Atomic Warfare will be released on December 7 — and today we bring you another track from the album, this one named “The End of the Beginning”.

 

 

You could pick any one of the three songs from the album that have surfaced so far and conclude very quickly that the people in this band aren’t newcomers — and in fact the band’s core members Francisco Bravo (bass/guitars) and Andrés Gonzáles (drums) trace their roots back to the early Chilean death metal band Dominus, which they founded in 1992. On this new album they are joined by new vocalist Bliol.

If the album’s title makes you curious, as it did me, I, Voidhanger tells us that “Ancient Atomic Warfare evokes visions of an archaic past, a cruel and primitive era where Lovecraftian forces of Evil and the darkest Sumerian gods battle for the supremacy over earth, leaving behind a devastated scenery of ruins, death and decay. It’s the sound of the Apocalypse before mankind’s advent… the end of the beginning.”

And that brings me back to the song you’re about to here. It does indeed summon visions of ghastly supernatural warfare, its combination of slithering leads, bone-grinding riffs, and bone-jarring percussion spawning vistas of destruction and the ascendency of hideous tyranny. Equally marked by pyrotechnical guitar solos and slow, heartless, cavernous vocals, “The End of the Beginning” is yet another herald of an album that should be on the radar screen of all fans of gargantuan death metal.

Whether crawling like the final movements of the mortally wounded or hammering like a giant piledriver, the song is staggeringly heavy and it exudes an atmosphere of pure evil.

As noted above, the album will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on December 7, both digitally and on CD. The cover art is by Sergio Gonzales. For ordering info, watch these spaces:

http://i-voidhanger.com
http://i-voidhanger.com/shop/
https://www.facebook.com/i.voidhanger.records

TRACK LIST:

1. Funeral In Absu (5:51)
2. The End Of The Beginning (8:22)
3. The Great Serpent Of Knowledge (6:42)
4. Declaration Of Supremacy (8:04)
5. Ancient Atomic Warfare (7:44)
6. Tribulations Of The Gods (8:54)

Total running time 45:37