SHORT BUT SWEET: INSISION – END OF ALL EP

(Yesterday’s SYNN REPORT brought us almost up to date on the discography of Sweden’s Insision. Today, Andy Synn finishes the job with his review of the band’s new EP — End of All.)

It’s always a great thing to be able to draw comparisons between the physical art that adorns a band’s release and the music contained therein. The cover for the EP melds elements of gruesome, physical morbidity and disturbing, spiritual horror, sick and decaying human figures haunted by tormented, ghostly faces displaying unimaginable terror and suffering  – condemned to the void and an eternity of pain that goes beyond the physical realm.

Echoes of this duality permeate the EP, mixing as it does elements of the band’s early, gore-soaked malevolence with their more recent forays into transcendent, inhuman malice. Cold and dehumanised in its fury, this is the sound of a band teetering on the edge of madness, unable to convey the extent of the horrors they have seen or the agonies that they have suffered.

The skulking, horror movie ambience of the intro builds an eerie death-march which serves as the calm before the chaos storm of “Expire” is unleashed. Seething with misanthropic passion and deadly intent, its fractured, ragged guitars scrape and weave through a series of crooked twists and turns, while mind-bending leads and helter-skelter drums spin their tale of inevitable collapse. (more after the jump . . .)

Progressively shifting from a down-tempo, martial rhythm into a tense, accelerating pattern of anarchic guitars, the song segues seamlessly into “Curvature”, an abominable arrangement of sand-blasting riffage and suffocating bass-lines combined into a lethal package of streamlined aggression. Crashing keyboard effects and harsh, strangled vocals help to starkly and unflinchingly portray the reverent terror of staring blindly into the void.

Continuing this journey, the EP moves effortlessly into the mechanistic, inhuman depravity of “Descend”, ripping and tearing with calculated ferocity. Utterly unforgiving and terrifically violent, the song is an orgy of stabbing, dissonant notes and writhing discordance dredged up from the blackest pits to be inflicted upon the weak and innocent in an expulsive gout of bone-jarring drums and sickeningly guttural vocals.

With no pause for breath, the EP dives straight into “Beckoning”, a blistering tight and technical descent into madness, both infectious and abhorrent in equal measure. Cacophonous and frenzied, clanking bass-notes and razor-sharp lead guitars clash in a colossal catastrophe, controlled and conducted with merciless precision by Marcus Jonsson’s relentless drumming.

“Ex Oblivione”, the final track on this release, serves to channel cosmic horror of vast and nebulous proportions through the bone-sawing, finger-rending savagery of our feeble mortal forms. Summoning the predatory menace of unknown, shapeless horrors which lurk just beyond our perceptions, the track seeks to shatter the listener’s tenuous grip on sanity by assaulting them with cataclysmic levels of grinding, distorted guitar-work and repugnant vocal discharges, heavy with the sickening brutality and harsh, unsettling clarity of madness.

Sample Song: “Expire”

[audio:https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/02_Insision_Expire.mp3|titles=Insisiojn – Expire]

EDITOR’S NOTE: End of All is available for purchase as a digital download at the Sevared Records web store (here).