Artist: Ara Subversor
Title: Retribution
Type: EP
Label: Digital / Death Prayer Records
I always keep an eye on the UK’s Death Prayer Records as I have the odd release they have put out here and there and I saw this and, well, who can resist a bullet belt circle? I didn’t really know the band name but I guessed this wasn’t going to be subtle, or friendly, but fancied a bit of noise. No named members at all, which I’ll be honest kind of bothers me these days, but probably just me…
Slap that play button…
Gunfire, a wandering, guitar and then the battery of drums and riffs hits. The vocal howls and it’s… wow. This is kind of on the brink of that war metal sound except that there is, in amongst the machine gun drum battery a dark and bleak melody. It surges to the front but this is still so in your face as a song, as music. It has such a hard, muscular sound, such an anger that roars inches from your face. It just obliterates.
‘Death Fumes’ drills down harder if anything. The vocals go so hard, biting and spitting and snarling like a pitbull, and you just feel you’re being rolled over by a tank, or some blood and muck caked iron monstrosity. A death metal, almost metalcore feel to the breakdown but just never lets go. A slow shift down in pace and… silence.
‘The Fall Of War’ brings back that grim atmosphere behind the attack, the bitter melody as the song just lays waste, spinning through gears, battering anything left standing. This is virulent, violent stuff indeed. It reeks of utter destruction, scorched and salted earth. The only reason for its existence is to destroy everything. A theme once more in ‘Caedes’, a relentless cutting down of everything before it; huge scything riffs, that dipping, grim melodic sense that seems to amplify the violence rather than take from it..
There’s a strange feel in this album. It is absolutely blazing apocalyptic black metal but the attack, the relentless savagery and determination keeps bring to mind early Integrity and reaching into deathcore but… not in the sound. Just the attitude of utter violence for its own ends somehow brings it to mind without the sound containing it at all really. Does that even make any sense? Probably not.
The final track is ‘Birth Of Vengeance’, a Gehenna cover. Didn’t ring any bells so I checked. No not that Gehenna. Or the other one. Or the one spelled a little differently. This is the US black metal/hardcore band. So maybe the above paragraph does make a little sense… More straightforward, more direct, lacking that eerie sense of melody of Ara Subversor but still a fine track indeed.
Another band I am going to have to backtrack on because from the monomaniacal focus on simply destroying anything before them, the blasting black metal with flecks of war/death/hardcore like shrapnel in the assault they have laid down some serious firepower here.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 