(Benighted‘s new album Ekbom comes out this Friday, April 12th, via Season of Mist, so the time is right to present DGR‘s review… which proceeds in phases.)
Benighted are old friends around here – No Clean Singing has taken the banner up for the band for a long time and have been covering them in one form or another since 2009(!).
We’ve covered their EPs, singles, and albums and there’s a pretty hot chance that your author here has been involved in a large part of that.
The high-speed core of Benighted‘s evolution into deathgrind form was found pretty early on, and well, they’ve danced into and out of -core, black metal, and brutal-death-inspired circles but they’ve always cycled back around to the sort of relentless blastbeating backbone that is their foundation.
For the last couple of years they’ve subsisted on a somewhat steady drip-feed of singles that allowed them to get the horror movie craze out of their system during the pandemic downtime, and Ekbom – upon first listen – doesn’t really mess around with the formula.
But it doesn’t take long – nor many listens – for the band’s latest album to start revealing itself as being something more.
I went through phases with Benighted‘s Ekbom when it came to judging how much I was enjoying the album. I imagine a lot of listeners will do the same but I’d bet the br(eeeeeeee)eakdown will likely look something similar to this:
Phase 1: Upon the first few listens with Ekbom: Yep, this is Benighted alright.
They’re definitely a hell of a lot faster this time around, standing in stark contrast to even the singles the group had released in the time between now and Obscene Repressed.
Phase 2: Okay, both the opening songs hit real hard. “Morgue”. How dare they appeal to my sensibilities like this.
Ekbom starts strong. Exceedingly strong almost. It makes sense that some of the earliest stuff released from Ekbom has been the opening songs because Benighted have carefully crafted a grouping here that early on and up until the titular “Ekbom” song go straight for the throat.
“Scars” is your first foray into what Benighted are launching this time and it has all the hallmarks of what you come to this band for. Benighted never stop moving in “Scars” and the song is a combination of ‘all energy’ and ‘obscenely heavy’. It’s the song that makes it clear Benighted probably will not be doing a massive reinvention of the wheel on this album, but have figured out how to do the best version of their particular sound so far. Granted, longer than expected time has passed between full-lengths for them but “Scars” seems to have benefited from having that extra time. It’s a punchy song that is one of the better examples of the ‘opening act song’ of an album.
“Morgue” on the other hand is the most gloriously stupid Benighted have gotten in some time and features some of the most blatant chugging guitar riffs as well. If you’ve listened to metal for a while then you’ll hear and see every single twist and turn “Morgue” makes before the song itself gets to it, even the build-up section before the final shout-chorus. It’s almost offensive how blatant its chugging riff and ignorant as hell breakdown segment is, appealing strictly to the almost cro-magnon and instinctual subsection; you’ll headbang along to it anyway and be mad at yourself afterwords. “Morgue” is stupid fun.
Phase 3: Wow; this disc goes quick. I think I’m on my fourth loop of this thing before noticing.
This is pretty self explanatory; Benighted never let off of the accelerator in this album and the damned thing is over before you even blink sometimes. There are multiple songs on Ekbom that are sub-two-and-a-half-minutes. They waste zero time getting to the point and then getting the hell out of the room. Benighted have had a grinding throughline in their music for a while and it becomes a big part of their identity on Ekbom. They are moving quick and really the one time you notice the group slowed down is in the title track, and that may just be for the tom-heavy drumming section that forces the band to groove a little bit. It’s unbelievably easy to find yourself cycling back around into scene setter “Prodome” before you even notice.
Phase 4: Ah, maybe Ekbom is one of those albums where the front-half is really loaded. That might be why it seems to move fast.
For lack of better phrasing, it is nightmarish just how stacked the front half of Ekbom is. Were the front half of Ekbom a person it could easily find a career as a model somewhere. It may seem silly to say this but you’ll also note that four segments in and the songs that’ve been addressed so far are all part of that front grouping. Not only that, but that is also where “Nothing Left To Fear” lays as well – the group’s self-proclaimed ‘fastest song’ – and that is the one that features Archspire‘s vocalist Oliver Rae Aleron, getting a lot more bre(eeeeee)athing room and time on the mic than he did during his blast down the door Kool-Aid-man style, light the room on fire and exit, approach in his appearance on Aborted‘s latest release Vault Of Horrors.
It’s two different approaches for sure but “Nothing Left To Fear” works out better simply because the song seems crafted around the idea of having him pop up, so you have multiple segments of vocal interplay where you have two individuals just out-yelling each other while the song chaotically spins itself into the atmosphere.
“Le vice des entrailles” on the starboard side of the ship, may be your dark horse of the album because this is the one where the opinion really started to change into ‘oh no, this may actually be a really good disc’. Built on equal segments pit riff, pit riff, pit riff, stupidity, madness, and more pit riffing, “Le vice des entrailles” is another song in the Ekbom lineup that could be classified solely as a fun song. It’s a song that is better as a whole than if you were to break it apart piece-by-piece. Upon dissection it’s clear that Benighted are in their own ballpark on that song, yet it seems they’ve figured out how to deliver a home run anyway, providing a little room for faith that Benighted may not be due for a massive shift in sound or making their own extremity mundane just yet.
Phase 5: Ah shit, the back half is also really loaded with good songs too.
So by now you’ve likely resigned yourself to the fact that Ekbom is pretty good in its front-half and you’ll compromise there. But that’s where it stops, right? After that is just another Benighted disc, solid songs and solid for a discography shuffle, the sort of stuff you seek out when you want to hear Julien Truchan growl over some stuff for a while? Yes and no.
Ekbom doesn’t really tail off, the party begins anew in its back half, and you have equal time given to death metal insanity on that front too. The back part of Ekbom is also where two of the previously mentioned shorter songs are positioned, among them “Fame Of The Grotesque” which features Blockheads vocalist Xav throughout as well. Makes sense that’s one of the shorter tracks too; you don’t bring in an equally fast deathgrind guy and put him on the crawling song in the tracklist.
The only time where things veer a little too hard into silly is during “A Reason For Treason”, which may just suffer by being in the shadows of the immensely strong songs surrounding it. It’s about on par with the three singles that Benighted had put out prior to the Ekbom album cycle, so if you’d enjoyed tracks like “Stab The Weakest”, “A Personified Evil”, or “Serve To Deserve”, it’ll be well-placed for you. But it does have “Fame” following it and the lead-up single and hammer-happy song “Metastasis” before it. It’s like a smaller city-wrecking storm surrounded by state-wide destroying hurricanes.
Phase 6: Fuck, I think I really like the new Benighted album.
Finally, welcome to the show. Benighted don’t reinvent the wheel at all with Ekbom – they may try on follow-up album Arbom but who knows? – but somehow manage to strike an even richer vein of the material that they’d already been mining for albums past. Maybe the band were pent up and had to let it all go in the time between 2020’s Obscene Repressed and now?
Either way, the gap in time for a band that had otherwise been on an every three years or so cycle seems to have done them a hell of a lot of good with Ekbom. It’s thirty-six minutes flies by like it’s nothing and it’s way heavier and faster than you might have expected from Benighted albums prior.
They seem to be having a blast with the music of Ekbom as well, gleefully firing themselves from one battering to another maelstrom to the next musical tornado with almost zero consideration for what that amount of velocity might be doing to their overall health. You’d be mad at yourself for recognizing just how easily the gears are turning in the Benighted machine this time around if you weren’t having fun with it as well.
While I may have initially approached Benighted‘s newest release with the understanding that they are a known quantity and I know that I’m in for a suitably good time – like death metal comfort food – I walked away (well, limped) from Ekbom surprised by just how good the release turned out to actually be.
https://redirect.season-of-mist.com/BenightedEkbom
https://orcd.co/benightedekbompresave
https://www.benighted.fr/
https://www.facebook.com/brutalbenighted