(Below you will find DGR‘s extensive review of the newest album from NZ’s Ulcerate, in advance of its June 14 release by Debemur Morti Productions.)
Weirdly enough, I had to check to see who had penned the last few reviews for Ulcerate’s releases as they’ve crossed our desks in the burnt-out husk that is more colloquially known as the ‘NCS Office’. The situation was one of those, ‘I’m pretty sure it was me, I am not a thousand percent sure it was me’.
You’ll forgive someone, of course, who has been spending a decent block of their heavy metal writing ‘career’ within the distant chasms of the Ulcerate discography for experiencing some sense of disassociation with the self. It turns out, it has in fact been yours truly for the most part, which means we can now add ‘Semi-Expert on Ulcerate’ to the resume, which’ll be only the third or fourth strangest thing on there, placed right up next to ‘balloon animal fluffer’.
Ulcerate’s career has long been one of endless suffocation and overwhelming darkness, somehow taking a three-piece band with a dynamo of a drummer and making it seem like every album has been the slow crush of a cliff side collapsing on you. It’s only been recently with Shrines Of Paralysis that the band have even lightly introduced the concept of a melody within their songs, and that took five albums to get there.
Ulcerate up to that point were like rocking out to the sound of an iron-works in full operation. They were molten in the way they moved. It’s a credit to them that they found a way to expand upon their chasm-dwelling sound in such a way that even though they’re slightly – a word doing enough heavy lifting in this sentence to compete in the Olympics – more approachable, the music remains immensely terrifying and daunting. Within the wave of dissonance-worshippers and cave-recording abusers, Ulcerate have managed to stay just ahead of the game every time, and they’re now at the point where releases are a little like a heavy metal cultural event.
Which brings us to the group’s newest album Cutting The Throat Of God, the most natural-sounding continuation of the band’s previous album Stare into Death and Be Still that you could have ever expected, where by sheer virtue of the album art and musical approach the band also somehow manage to conjure the spirits of both Shrines Of Paralysis and Vermis before them as well.
While Meshuggah many years ago may have directed us to not ‘look down’, Ulcerate take a similar approach with their album writing, in that they do not look backwards. They are forever moving forward and plowing ahead in a singular direction, with callbacks to earlier releases either being by happenstance or because those similarities have become long-lasting pillars of the band’s sound.
Drummer Jamie Saint Merat has long been the visual auteur for the group, so it’s interesting to see Cutting The Throat Of God cycle back to the deep blood-red of Shrines Of Paralysis when it comes to the album art, embodying the slow-moving music within. Prior to this they’ve mostly been bathed in disconnected and dispassionate greys and blacks, with the truly furious music – Everything Is Fire for instance – receiving the molten color treatment, which carried over a little bit musically into Destroyers Of All following.
Cutting The Throat Of God flowers out of the seeds planted by its immediate predecessor. You could almost treat the two as a double album, though they approach the overall Ulcerate sound from somewhat different directions. Cutting The Throat Of God is Ulcerate’s first seven-song album in some time, yet still places the overall material around the fifty-plus minute mark. Ulcerate achieve this, surprisingly, by having quite a fair share of doom-metal inspired passages within their construct here.
It is an album still built out of a tremendous number of bellows and guitar hammerings by vocalist Paul Kelland and guitarist Michael Hoggard, but with the Ulcerate songwriting core still plenty present, the band expand with these massive atmospheric passages that make many of the songs within Cutting The Throat Of God more composed and melancholic than you might expect from a group whose career previously has left listeners in stark, blackened ash. Now, you might actually find a fading ember or two.
That’s not to behave as if Ulcerate have absorbed the teachings of a Mirror Reaper-era Bell Witch but they land themselves somewhere closer to what the now-dormant Plague Widow were unintentionally working towards, with the doom metal over grind-and-tech drumming filth or even some of the more truly suffocating and depressing moments that are spread throughout the discography of Australia’s Convulsing.
Otherwise, Ulcerate still sound very much like Ulcerate on Cutting The Throat Of God, and somehow that amorphous, blackened vortex of suffocating bleakness that they’ve contorted their sound into has done it again. The title track alone is highlight worthy and was smartly placed right at the end of this release; otherwise, “Cutting The Throat Of God” might have been a showstopper – especially when that final closing guitar melody comes screaming in from the left speaker to end the song. The briefest moments become spotlights in a darkened cave on Ulcerate albums, and Cutting The Throat Of God has many more than you’d expect.
“To Flow Through Ashen Hearts” does a fantastic job as the opening number, both welcoming people back into the Ulcerate fold – it’s barely a minute thirty into the song before the first building collapse of a vocal part hits – and also clearing up any misconceptions that the band might stray from the depressingly bleak atmospherics they were creating on Stare Into Death And Be Still. That album – and Vermis’ – obsession with death and the conscious obliteration within the void afterward seems to haunt the group’s newest release like an ever-present specter.
Five songs into Cutting The Throat Of God and Ulcerate hammer you with “To See Death Just Once” – which the band have released just ahead of the album’s release – and the song itself lies somewhere between an injured crawl and a forced drag through barely-lit swamp. “To See Death Just Once” is a song in which Ulcerate absolutely land their auditory punch somewhere between bulldozer and suffering, forcefully yanking between the two at multiple points within its eight and a half minutes.
“The Dawn Is Hollow” and “Further Opening The Wounds” both take a similar tack to one another, sharing fairly close run times (songs as a whole drift between seven and nine and a half minutes here, but these are giant songs) and both being more melodically minded. Granted, in Ulcerate language that means they break up the big, battering nightmare passages with quieter guitar leads, but even then the band’s drummer can’t sit quite still. It isn’t long before Ulcerate return to the ‘mood rather than music’ hammering that’s been their calling card. The band adding a new aspect to their darkened rooms and empty halls approach is appreciated and does help keep Cutting The Throat Of God interesting as well as annihilating.
These two songs are also the clearest continuations of the musical concepts and sculptures Ulcerate were carving through their predecessor album. They’re also why you could treat the two records as a double release were you so inclined, assuming you didn’t have anything to do for four or five hours following, because it can be a little hard to move after a two-hour block of what Ulcerate are serving up here.
If you’ve long been a part of the masses who assemble at the Ulcerate altar every three or four years then you’ll have some idea of what the band are doing before even hitting ‘play’ on the new album. Part of Ulcerate’s ‘always forward, absorb and grab everything in our path’ approach is that a large part of their formula consists of calculated iterations versus massive leaps. Ulcerate found their sound very early on and since then have made a career of carving it into different statues but still very recognizably ‘them’.
In other words, Cutting The Throat Of God is still recognizably an Ulcerate disc but with such massive highlights spread throughout its seven songs that you have to imagine it is going to put up a monstrous fight to stick with people from its mid-June release ‘til the end of the year. There’s so much within its musical territory that Cutting The Throat Of God consistently surprises after you make it past the initial ‘obliterating wall of sound’. It’s an impressive, depressive, melancholic, and personality-suffocating piece of work and a hell of a worthy followup for their collective discography.
https://ulcerate.bandcamp.com/album/cutting-the-throat-of-god
https://www.debemur-morti.com/en/12-eshop
https://debemurmorti.aisamerch.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Ulcerate/