For those who have supped from the hideous potions of death concocted by the Finnish band Obscure Burial in their two previous demos — 2012’s God’s Abomination and 2014’s Epiphany — the prospect of a debut album has provoked a mixture of fear and relish, and that frightful hungering only intensified when the band released a single from the album named “Imago Mortis” last summer, and a further sonic abomination named “Necrophagous Ritual” more recently.
We don’t have long to wait for the album. Self-titled, it will be released by Invictus Productions (who also brought us those demos) on December 15. And you don’t have long to wait for further signs of the album’s mind-mangling black/death sorcery, because we have a third track for you today: “Dawn of Eschaton“.
Of the music on Epiphany, we wrote that “anyone who shies away from raw, flesh-rending, berserker blackened death metal with a heavy emphasis on speed can stop reading right here, because that’s what you’ll get in spades from Epiphany“, but added that “if you get a flooding adrenaline rush from ripping riffs, weapons-grade drumwork, and vocals that sound like a demon pantheon, you’re about to get a satisfying fix for that addiction — in fact, you may not need another fix for days or weeks, because this is potent, uncut, and borderline toxic stuff”.
“Dawn of Eschaton” (like the album as a whole) displays even greater mastery of these ingredients, while revealing others as well. The sound straddles a divide between corrosive and clear, between the sound of profane filth and the supernatural glow of arcane sorcery. And the music itself is planted at an intersection of hard-charging, head-whipping barbarism and stalking, nightmarish hallucination.
In one of its many dimensions, the song delivers jolting, juggernaut destructiveness. In another, it groans and crawls, oozing poison and plague. In yet another, it thrashes like a wounded beast. And at roughly the song’s mid-point, the rhythm section locks in to a compulsive mid-paced groove while the lead guitarist executes a swooping, diving, swirling solo that will have heavy metal maniacs lifting their claw-shaped hands to the sky.
The vocals, by the way, are absolutely wild.
This really is top-notch stuff — highly infectious (in all senses of the word) and deadly evil. As the album’s advance press accurately portrays, it draws upon influences that include Necrovore, Profanatica, Sadistic Intent, and early Possessed, while adding the band’s own creative spin on what has come before them.
If you like what you hear in our premiere, be sure to check out those two previously released singles via the second Bandcamp player below.
Pre-order:
https://invictusproductions666.bandcamp.com/album/obscure-burial
Obscure Burial:
https://www.facebook.com/Obscure-Burial/347232682060598