AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MALGÖTH — “GLORY THROUGH SAVAGERY”

 

Of all the titles that Malgöth might have chosen for their debut album, the one they picked is a near-perfect representation of the music: Glory Through Savagery. The experience is indeed one of breathtaking ferocity and destructive impact, but both the band and the songs also revel in their psychotic excesses, creating a continuous atmosphere of no-holds-barred derangement that glories in the chaos they create.

While the album maintains connections to the vaunted traditions of malignant Canadian blackened death metal, it carves its own abominable path in unorthodox yet still terrifying ways. The music is not merely a titan of globe-spanning ruination but it’s also delirious — and deliriously inventive. The press materials for Iron Bonehead Productions, who will release the album tomorrow (October 1st), describe it as “a kaleidoscopic experience, a fever dream of war metal turned absolutely inside out”, and that’s absolutely true — as you’re about to find out through our premiere of a complete album stream.

 

Ambient sounds swell in eerie and ominous tones at the outset of opener “Throne of Infinite Power“, pierced by horrific roars and screams, building toward a searing wave of destabilizing sound — and then the music explodes in a tumult of percussive bludgeoning, siren-like riffing, demented flickering leads, and unhinged vocal tirades. Like the album as a whole, it’s a dense and destructive hurricane of sound, but there is indeed a feeling of wild, blazing glory in the rapidly morphing guitar contortions — and the fleet-fingered and multiply layered fretwork definitely does morph, repeatedly, creating the feeling of a diabolical carnival.

In the songs that follow, there’s barely any relent in the breathtaking and bombastic ferocity of Malgöth’s attack. The turbocharged rampage of “Barbaric Onslaught” sounds like a furious deluge of bombs and maniacal discharges of mortar fire. Guns blaze, the earth explodes in one massive detonation after another, scattering stone and body parts, and the riffing ceaselessly cavorts and contorts, creating an atmosphere of mad and mauling mayhem. The very title of “Clubbed Into Pulp” also accurately represents the song’s brutally hammering impact, though the riffing also frantically cuts like circle saws, and the fret-melting leads channel harrowing anguish and pain, just as the vitriolic intensity of the hideous and harrowing vocal assaults put shivers down the spine.

After those absolutely breathtaking opening salvos, which are in the red-zone of speed and intensity, Malgöth do change gears in “Unrelenting Force”, which methodically pounds like a massive industrial pile-driver before the drumming starts spitting bullets at a terrific rate and the guitars and vocalists scream like massed innocents on fire.

By this point it will come as no surprise that “Immortal Torment” remorselessly simulates humongous excavating machines plundering and gouging the earth as the vocalists continue to alternately make horrid imperious proclamations and lose their minds in throat-ruining screams, and the guitars writhe and flicker in semblances of violent insanity. Nor does “Executing the Weak” offer any consolation. Its opening ambient moments generate an atmosphere of terrible cruelty and hopelessness, and then the war-zone mauling and mangling resume, spliced with dervish-like riffing and blurting string-squeals that seems to channel serial-killer delight.

Giant guitar-hornets buzz in “Destroyed By Savages”, surrounding discharges of percussive automatic weaponry, bunker-busting instrumental cannonades, deranged soloing, and bestial madhouse vocals. So dedicated are Margöth to their mission that “Spiritual Contamination” provides no mercy but instead inflicts another experience in titanic bludgeoning and hideous evisceration, coupled with a wailing solo and humongous groaning chords that seem in keeping with the song’s title, and “Cauldron of Pus” indeed boils like a disease raging through a devastating earthquake, leavened with a dismal episode of crawling plague and a rhythmless maelstrom of skull-scouring noise.

With “The Eternal Age of Iron”, Malgöth chose to end their 41-minute gauntlet of sonic decimation not with any sign of compassion or comfort, but with something different nonetheless — at the outset, eerie chiming and clanging arpeggios ring above glimmering ambient mists. But of course that’s just the prelude to one last riot of bone-smashing low-end assaults, mutilated riffing, and macabre and malevolent vocal cacophonies.

And so, this Canadian trio have achieved what the album title promises — Glory Through Savagery. Discover for yourselves:

Iron Bonehead will release the album on CD, vinyl LP, and digital formats.

MORE INFO:
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/malg-th-glory-through-savagery
https://ironbonehead.de