On March 12th the Swedish modern death metal band Orecus will follow up their 2016 Conclusion EP with a debut album accurately named The Obliterationist through Violent Groove (a label whose own name is entirely fitting for this band’s music). Today we present a full stream of the album, preceded by a preview of what you’ll be in for.
Orecus choose to begin the album with the title track, and it provides an explosive introduction to their terrifically destructive and disturbing strategies. It delivers jolting and jabbing riffs with pile-driving power and savage energy, accompanied by gritty, ferocious, belly-deep growls and attention-grabbing drum rhythms, which often provide a counterpoint to the rapid-fire riffing and which, in the chorus, transform into maniacal blasting as the music soars in delirious, blazing fashion. The song builds up to an even more brutalizing and compulsive hammer-sequence whose piston-driven blows will send your head pumping like an oil derrick.
Like that riveting album opener, the remaining songs are generally full-throttle, geared toward full-blown barbarity and maximum punishment. They’re all anchored by crushing, brutalizing, and thoroughly electrifying grooves which mostly operate at high speed, and they also feature gripping counterpoint snare patterns. Those drum patterns are often more measured and methodical in contrast to the turbocharged jackhammering of the riffs, and tend to speed up when those jolting riffs give way to more panoramic sounds.
That reference to “panoramic” sounds is intended to capture another key ingredient of the songs — the band’s infiltration of them with eerie, alien, and unnerving wisps of melody that flare in supernatural spectacles of sound, or with accents that create sensations of queasy miasma, seething delirium, or oppressive misery.
There are other vocal accents in mix as well. On “Blodvite”, guest vocalist Chad Kapper (Frontierer) adds shrieking intensity to the song’s jackhammering grooves and hornet-swarm cruelty, while on “Below the Threshold” Soreption’s Fredrik Söderberg augments the music with his berserker snarls, which at times create a bestial harmony with the gruesome growls of Orecus frontman Philip Grüning.
Those guest appearances are ravaging, but no more so than Grüning’s more frequent expulsions, and no more stunning than the explosive detonations and bursts of machine-gun riffing that Orecus strew across the obliterating war zones they’ve created.
The piston-driven bludgeoning is persistently merciless but also well-calculated to get your head moving, yet other surprises do lie in wait, such as the darting and rippling arpeggios that emerge in “Unborn, Reborn” when the pounding slows, lending an air of mysterious brightness to the punishment, or the times during “My Manifest” when the band adopt a more mid-paced momentum in order to create a bleak, and ominous experience. And in the album closer, “Extinct”, the bass gets a chance to shine, and the song’s streaming melodies create an esoteric atmosphere around a final dose of blistering snare work, double-kick battering, skull-busting mania, and brutish stomps.
And with that, we’ll leave you to enjoy the full album stream below, and to explore the pre-order opportunities.
PRE-ORDER:
https://orecus.bandcamp.com/
ORECUS:
https://www.facebook.com/orecusofficial