Ilat Mahru is a black metal entity shrouded in mystery.
In the Encyclopaedia Metallum and on the Bandcamp page for the entity’s debut album Incipit Akkadian, the band’s location is identified as Egypt, a rare spawning ground for black metal, though the reference also could have been “Ancient Egypt” (a less geographically specific and more spiritually attuned location).
Whether the band in its recordigs is a single person or more than one is a question un-answered. The source of the band’s name is also a conundrum. Trying to find its meaning or derivation through googling proved fruitless for this searcher.
Perhaps some of these mysteries were answered for metal-lovers who attended Estonia’s Howls of Winter XI underground black metal gathering which took place in Tallinn earlier this month, because Ilat Mahru performed there. Or maybe questions were still left unanswered.
Well, we should probably allow the band to preserve its mysteries as long as they care to, and just be content with the music — though it has mysteries of its own, as you’re about to discover for yourselves through our premiere stream of Incipit Akkadian in advance of its March 1st release by Death Prayer Records.
photo by Duncan McCall
The album follows a self-titled debut demo released last year. The album includes only four tracks, though one of them is nearly 15 minutes long. The other three aren’t that long, but they don’t fly by in a blink either, even though the music often does move swiftly, with obliterating consequences.
“Deluge Wisdom” provides the introduction to what Incipit Akkadian brings us. It seizes attention very quickly. Like its title, it’s a deluge — a flood of raw, searing sound that simultaneously scrapes and burns the senses above enormous booming and rumbling tumult in the low end.
Horrific screams fight to be heard through the ruinous maelstroms. A shrill and brutally distorted lead guitar whips, writhes, and pulses in deliriums of caustic madness. Another voice might be uttering solemn quavering incantations, but it might be a non-human instrument. The sounds are so dense and abrading that picking out the individual ingredients isn’t easy.
As they say in the trade, this music isn’t for the faint of heart nor for tender ears. “Through the Gates of Innana” is no less fanatical than the opening song. In the low end it still sounds like the earth’s mantle violently shaking itself apart. The blown-out guitars still whine and buzz, like dense swarms of acid-drenched knives propelled by a sandstorm.
When the drums begin to bound as they boom, the guitars both scream and moan, both deranged and dismal, before the subterranean hammer-fest resumes. The dense, scarring sound comes in waves of radioactive grit, pierced by unhinged howls and bursts of frantic fretwork that seems to scream in exultation.
By now you’re surely wondering (if you haven’t run away yet or called emergency services) what Ilat Mahru will do in that 15-minute track, “Vengeance at the Spoiling of the Ruins“. Is it, you may ask, 15 minutes of unceasing, unvarnished ruination?
In one sense, it is, because the tonal qualities of the instrumentation don’t change. On the other hand, the gargantuan movements in the low end do frequently switch up the tempos (and thus the magnitude of the destruction on display), and the riffing changes as well, channeling a range of terrible moods, from berserker violence to soul-sucking oppressiveness and the most incurable hopelessness.
For music this intrinsically hostile to a listener’s sensorium, there are even moments in “Vengeance…” that become unexpectedly hypnotic and eerie. The grim slashing chords create a kind of monstrous pulse, and the shrill squirming tones begin to seem almost magical, like unhinged djinns freed from incantations that imprisoned them for millennia.
Why stop there? One more track remains, and “Ziggurat” turns out to be perhaps the eeriest experience of them all. Make no mistake, it’s still brutally rough and raw, still geared toward overpowering the listener and shredding the mind into tatters, but the most piercing and wailing elements within the hurricane create an unmistakably occult atmosphere — though to be fair, that atmosphere has shrouded the album all along.
How to sum this up? It’s likely to appeal most strongly to fans of raw, bestial black metal. For fans like those, or others whose endurance allows them to become somewhat more accustomed to Ilat Mahru‘s abusive tactics as the album proceeds, they will discover diabolical facets within these sandstorms and earthquakes, though some don’t really become discernible until the second listen or the third. On a first listen, it’s more likely you’ll just lose your mind.
Or to put it more succinctly, if you looking for a way to throw your mind into a nightmare storm and become lost in it, you’re at the right place.
Death Prayer will release Incipit Akkadian in a glass mastered 6-panel Digipack CD edition housed in matte varnish, limited to 200 copies, as well as digitally. Other formats will come later.
PRE-ORDER:
https://ilatmahru.bandcamp.com/album/incipit-akkadian
DEATH PRAYER:
https://www.deathprayerrecords.com
https://www.facebook.com/deathprayerrecords