(Andy Synn presents three short but savage releases to terrify your eardums)
Look, a while back I promised I’d be better at covering more EPs this year.
And, let’s face it, I have failed in that task pretty abjectly.
But I’m trying… which is why today I want to draw your attention to three recently-released (or upcoming) bite-sized portions of brutality courtesy of Disentomb, Emasculator and Persecutory.
DISENTOMB – NOTHING ABOVE
Look, I loved Disentomb‘s last album, 2019’s The Decaying Light – so much so, in fact, that I gave it pride of place in my “Critical Top Ten” of the year, and called it “the gold standard of Brutal Death Metal”.
But if there was one small complaint I had – and, trust me, I didn’t have many more than that – it was that certain songs were occasionally a little too short for their own good, and I’d happily have wallowed in all the filth and fury with them for a while longer.
And it seems the band might have felt somewhat similarly, as the four songs which make up this EP – while not massively longer on average (mostly clocking in at around the four minute mark, with “Drear Prophecies” pushing the envelope to a full five minutes) – just feel that little bit more fleshed out and fully formed.
The aforementioned “Drear Prophecies”, for example, picks up pretty much where The Decaying Light left off, melding the band’s increasingly Disso-Death influenced approach with an almost unrelenting assault of technical brutality/brutal technicality, while still finding space midst all the discordant density and in-your-face intensity to add a splash of doom-laden atmospherics and moody melody when and where it’s needed.
“When the Black Begins…” then adds an even heavier dose of stomping, Suffocation-esque groove, all wrapped up in some suitably finger-flensing, fretboard-warping bass and guitar work, after which the churning riffs and charred hooks of “No God Unconquered” (featuring a suitably monstrous guest appearance from Job For A Cowboy frontman Jonny Davy) manage, somehow, to feel both frenetically fast and suffocatingly slow, while also pushing the envelope in terms of eerie ambience and groaning, doom-laden dissonance.
After all that, it’s then left to the relatively straightforward – in Disentomb terms, at least – title-track to close things out with a furious four minute burst of contorted guitars and distorted, blast-fuelled grooves that should, if you have any sense, leave you champing at the bit to hear whatever the band are going to come up with next!
EMASCULATOR – THE DISFIGURED AND THE DIVINE
I’m actually pretty proud of myself that I’ve managed to get around to covering Emasculator‘s debut EP before it’s actually released (though only just, as it officially comes out tomorrow, so I’m cutting it pretty close) as the band evidently have all the talent necessary to make a big impact on the Brutal Death scene.
Sure, there are obvious comparisons to be made to the likes of Suffocation and early Hour of Penance (in fact, the best moments on the EP remind me of the more streamlined, yet still stunningly heavy, moments of the latter’s mid-late 2000s period), and there’s definitely a few similarities to Abnormality scattered here and there (and not just because the two projects share a vocalist), but the potential here is absolutely huge.
Some of the EP’s obvious highlights include oppressively heavy opener “Ecstasy in Disseverment (Of Self)” – sure, the whole release is “heavy”, but this one really feels like it possesses a palpable, almost physical weight, and sets a very high bar immediately for the rest of the record – and the absolutely hammering “Eradication of the Asuras”, with the absolute peak coming in the form of penultimate powerhouse “Age of the Goddess”, which incorporates some really nasty rhythmic hooks and gnarly technical twists into the mix alongside all the usual bruising brutality and gruesome gutturals.
There’s still some room for improvement, of course – honestly, I’d be very interested to see if the group were able to incorporate the more esoteric and ambient elements from mid-EP oddity “The Unassailable” more closely into the music in the future, as I feel like a more direct contrast between this more unorthodox (and as yet rather unexplored) side of their sound and their obvious love neck-wrecking, gut-wrenching sonic violence would help give them more of an identity beyond just “brutal as hell” – but there’s no question that Emasculator are already operating at a very high level, and the only way from here is up!
PERSECUTORY – THE GLORIOUS PERSECUTION
I’ve been a fan of these guys for a while now, especially their last album, 2022’s Summoning the Lawless Legions), which I described as:
“…a blasphemous, blast-fuelled brand of Black Metal, heavily accented with an array of grim ‘n’ grisly Death Metal influences, whose raving, almost rabid vocals and raw, live-wire intensity should most definitely appeal to fans of bands like Impiety, Blasphemy, and Necrophobic (and many more besides)“.
So when I discovered they’d dropped a brand new EP, featuring three more killer cuts of blistering Blackened Death Metal devastation I knew I had to cover it, beginning by lavishing praise upon the manic fury of opener “Infernal Gateways to Watchers”, which finds the band operating at a level of intensity possibly even higher than before, paring back the more overtly melodic touches from their last album (or, at least, incorporating them into the mix even more tightly in the form of lashings of lethal tremolo) and shifting the ratio of Black to Death Metal a little more in favour of the former than the latter.
That’s not to say they’ve hugely altered their approach, of course – the second half of “Infernal Gateways…” for example, has a doomy, deathly weight to it that ties it back to the band’s previous works – but there’s definitely been an underlying shift to a more stripped-down and savage approach, as epitomised by the nigh-on relentless blast ‘n’ burn bombardment of “Ecstatic Demonlords”, whose vicious auditory assault pulls absolutely no punches… yet also conceals a darkly malevolent melodic undercurrent.
Like I said, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel – or set out to – but in terms of sheer, elemental force each of these three tracks (including the climactic title-track) possess more than enough pitch-black power to leave you all but breathless and utterly blown away, again and again.