AN NCS PREMIERE: MIASMAL SABBATH — “THE ORACULAR VOICE”

 

On their debut album Ominous Radiance, the Greek band Miasmal Sabbath have pulled off a neat trick. They’ve combined d-beat death metal with — as the album title itself beautifully conveys — the sound of ominous radiance, which is to say the music radiates a sensation of otherworldly exoticism that’s charged with peril and dreadful grandeur.

The album masterfully accomplishes even more than that, but those are the sensations that probably best describe the song we’re presenting today in advance of the record’s September 25 release by Unholy Prophecies.

 

 

Miasmal Sabbath‘s three members have played in other underground bands, but joined together in this formation with the object of devoting themselves to d-beating death metal. Yet it seems that what they created has come to have a life of its own, and has grown far beyond what might have been expected from either their 2016 self-titled EP or their follow-on EP, 2017’s Ascension of the Foulest. “The Oracular Voice” is a great example of that growth.

Momentous booming drums and a riveting, rapidly swirling riff announce the song. The drumming shifts patterns from furious hammering to d-beat rhythms as the riffing soars and slashes. The vocals are slashing too — a furious throat-slashing assault on the senses. There’s an air of grim majesty in the song, and a primal, heavy-weight urgency in its surging forward momentum.

But the momentum ebbs, and all the instruments join together in a brutish pounding sequence that becomes the prelude to fearsome fanfare chords and a methodical neck-cracking beat. The atmosphere of that sequence is unearthly and chilling — and what follows it is blazing, battering chaos, still eerie but also wild and punishing. Yet after another bridge the music changes again, becoming a war-charge of rapidly flickering fretwork and pulverizing drum munitions. The sensation is one of unchained, savage ecstasy, and the song finishes in another boisterous but perilous d-beat romp accented by the vocalist’s rabid bark.

In short, the music is multi-faceted and dynamic, and a sure sign of a band with songwriting ambition, and the talent to realize it in thrilling fashion.

 

The ambition behind Ominous Radiance is also signified by its length — it clocks in at nearly an hour. To quote the accompanying PR material: “Ominous Radiance charges hard – VERY HARD – with all the crush ‘n’ clang you’d expect from a band equally influenced by Indecent and Obscene as Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, as much Mental Funeral as Allday Hell, but is given haunting atmosphere and deceptively epic songwriting which squarely put this into a rarefied realm altogether.”

As another sign of what the album has to offer, we’re also including a stream of the previously released track “Chaos Magnum” in addition to today’s premiere. For further info about how to pick up the album when it becomes available for order, keep an eye on the locations linked below:

UNHOLY PROPHECIES:
http://www.unholyprophecies.com
https://www.facebook.com/UnholyProphecies666

MIASMAL SABBATH:
https://www.facebook.com/miasmalsabbath