(We present DGR‘s review of the latest album by the Norwegian death metal band Blood Red Throne, which is out now on Soulseller Records.)
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have the book of death metal read to me. The classic chapters would probably be incredible, set in stone and defined by an era of wild experimentation, gore obsession, and studio production ranging from ‘what the hell were they thinking’ to ‘wow, that’s impressive’.
For a genre that has been around as long as it has, it remains to this day impressively fluid. Both an extreme sport by which modern athletes test their mettle but also one wherein people take that blueprint and mutilate it into many other forms. They twist, morph, contort, and absorb so much that at times the ‘death metal’ genre-tag becomes more like a filter through which other things are forced through than the starting seed.
The modern chapters that are still being written are the ones that would be most intriguing based simply off of ‘where do you even start to approach it?’. You have regional scenes, all with their own hallmarks, you have outside influences that have gone unacknowledged that simply become part of death metal, and you have the blastbeat vein that became its own throughline. and that’s just the starting part.
You have experimenters and vanguards alike, and over the course of an eleven-album career Blood Red Throne have shown themselves to be perfectly fitted into the ‘vanguard’ role. They’ve added their own sentences and addendums to the modern segment of death metal’s book over the years, recent attempts bringing their name well into the limelight in the world of brutality, and with late-January’s Nonagon, Blood Red Throne are finally sitting down to read those segments back to you.
As noted, Nonagon is Blood Red Throne‘s eleventh album. They’ve kept to a surprisingly steady pace of releases coming out every two to three years with little room to budge in between. They’ve also had quite the array of musicians within their ranks, so even though Nonagon represents the first album with vocalist Sindre Wathne Johnsen at the head of the good ship Blood Red Throne, you’d hardly be surprised to find out that Nonagon is pretty much ‘business as usual’ for the Norwegian death metal crew.
Blood Red Throne found their particular cut of death metal meat ages ago and have specialized in it since, and Nonagon is an album of them playing it pretty close to the chest in that regard; hence why Nonagon can seem like Blood Red Throne reading their particular additions to the book of death metal back to you. They play with a lot of the tried-and-true, and from the opening moments of the album the band have already made it plainly clear that even though they’ve once again welcomed someone else to the microphone-mutilation spot, there isn’t going to be much else shifting on the deck here.
Blood Red Throne are reliable in that sense, in that every album has a sizable handful of absolutely killer songs and a few of them with wonderfully dumb – in a comic book sense – names to go alongside them. Weirdly enough, on Nonagon a decent block of them arrive in the back half of the disc where Blood Red Throne morph themselves into musical snowplows, creating body-walls on the side of the road for the next unfortunate prick to hydroplane and crash into.
“Split Tongue Sermon” is wonderfully demented at times and it is criminal that following it are the songs “Blade Eulogy” and “Fleshrend”, both of which create a hell of a triptych of excellent tracks to close out Nonagon. These are also the songs post the titular “Nonagon” song when Blood Red Throne start to break from a surprisingly rigid four-plus minute song format.
“Fleshrend” stretches into the six-plus-minute range, though some of it is the group themselves letting the song just breathe and extending parts out rather than immediately subjecting the listener to the next meat-tenderizing. “Every Silent Plea” is interesting as a roadside distraction as well, as you move from front half to back half of Nonagon, given that a proto-version of the song exists as a single with different lyrics and song-title under the name “Latrodectus”. It’s where Nonagon shifts from its slower, groovier segment into the faster batterings.
Where the album lurches a bit is that it has pacing issues here and there. It’s not a requirement that a death metal group go lightspeed at all times – especially since that arms race has acheived almost stupid levels of velocity – or even thrash-levels of fast, but a good chunk of Nonagon hovers around a heavy mid-tempo groove. Blood Red Throne have made a career of songs that sound like your local butcher baseball-tossing shoulder-cuts into a tile wall, and that shows here. There’s plenty of rotating ‘whump-snare’ one-two style of song within Nonagon, yet if you glance at the tracklisting you’ll note that the first five songs of the album are all blocked around four and a half minutes at length, which can make the disc at times feel like it is shuffling its feet in terms of ‘getting going’.
“Epitaph Inscribed” is a mean song on its own yet it does give the impression for the first few songs of Nonagon that Blood Red Throne are going to keep things at a slime-crawling pace and slowly carve out their segment of music this time, versus the upfront brutality that you might’ve prepared yourself for. There are flashes within that first block of music where it’s like the band have been effectively lit on fire and things pick up, but really, Nonagon doesn’t seem to gain its footing after wandering the wastes until about halfway into “Tempest Sculptor” with its hefty gallop, and then again within the aforementioned revised version of “Every Silent Plea”.
You would almost wonder whether, if some of the tracks on Nonagon were shuffled around in between some of the faster numbers – or at least quicker openings in the case of “Nonagon” and its ever-shifting form – the album would be less ‘giant creature slowly waking up to then destroy city’ and more ‘scene being witnessed mid-destruction’.
But by and large we’ve focused heavily on how Blood Red Throne have managed to maintain a fairly consistent sound throughout multiple bandmember changes and a long-running career. They’re a band who have a solid mid-point, such that were you to take even the most recent three to four albums – you know, like a decade or so worth of material – you could mix them all up and have a blast. Nonagon adds some murderously fun songs to that collection and brings along some killer whirling-storm album art with it.
The new album may take a little bit to finally get going, but when the Blood Red Throne bulldozer does finally get rolling, it’s a hard machine to stop. It’s a frightening thing, witnessing a fully operational Blood Red Throne in action. and the last block of songs of Nonagon really do hammer that home.
The front pack may depend more on your preferences for groovier-death but that is the part where it feels like Blood Red Throne are pulling from their own pages of the book of death metal. They summon up a lot of old ghosts and pull from a lot of classic death metal riff-work and drumming here, even from throughout their own career. Nonagon is a solid-as-Earth-layer album release and if you need death metal to appeal purely to the instinct part of the brain, this is a great release for that.
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