Perennial favourites of SonicAbuse, Necro Deathmort have been described upon these pages as creating “intelligent, dark and furiously inventive music that, by turns, enraptures and terrifies the listener.” This is certainly true of EP 2 which turns up the heat from the more relaxed EP 1 and places the listener right into the heart of a dirty, guitar-strewn industrial maelstrom. Where EP 1 emphasized the beats, EP 2 emphasizes the darkest, most corrosive aspects of the necro deathmort sound and it may even surpass its predecessor in terms of pure, adrenalin-inducing dark wave.
Opening with ‘sundive’, we’re instantly into the worn and gritty world of Ulver and Axis of Perdition, all filtered drums and throbbing, relentless bass. The music is nervy, cinematic in feel, and draws upon the lingering feeling that someone, somewhere is watching your every move. It is music for the paranoid, drawn out and almost sadistic in its desire to menace and terrorize the listener and it is quite excellent. Like a drawn out Gary Numan instrumental, you feel the dark beating heart that sits at the music’s center, but whilst this music may be under human control, the potential for the technology to run amok never feels too far away. Briefly subduing the beats, ‘Mirus’ sounds like the long-lost soundtrack to some dank Dario Argento movie, with overheating and scarred oscillators slowly building to a sudden explosion of carefully channeled fury. The guitars, when they come, burst upon the listener with scolding heat and yet it is almost a relief to escape the pressure-cooker confines of the song’s lengthy build up. Where ‘Mirus’ builds to a towering display of elemental doom, ‘channel fever’ wastes no time, opening up with a beat ripped from an eighties pop hit, tortured and placed, bleeding and dazed, into a turbo-charged industrial exoskeleton. With its skittering beat and stuttering ambience, it would make the perfect soundtrack to a reimagined and darker take on the terminator, and there is no question that the dark, trippy nature of the music conjures up unbidden images of half-seen violence.
Whilst ‘channel fever’ features a moment of almost John-Carpenter-esque ambience amidst its pummeling beats, ‘bleeding’ aims deeper and darker still, the bass rumbling from the speakers as layers of hyper-distorted guitar do much to recall the unholy noise of Sunn 0))). Unusually, the track also features harrowing screams that emerge, half-formed from the midst of the corrosive riffs and as a result ‘bleeding’ proves to be a challenging and intense five minutes. ‘Deadlight’ sees things move in a more synth-orientated direction which, after the endless abyss of ‘bleeding’ is something of a relief. Recalling Walter Carlos’ astonishing soundtrack for A Clockwork orange, or perhaps the intro of ‘shine on you crazy diamond’ played at half speed, the droning synths unsettle simply because they refuse to coalesce into something traditionally resembling music, despite the fact that the overall effect is utterly mesmerizing. The track segues into the lengthy ‘aer’, the EP’s final track and one that clevery integrates throbbing industrial, Carpenter-esque atmospherics and Aphex Twin into a cohesive and disturbing finale.
You may think you know Necro Deathmort, and certainly the reports that the EP contains some of the band’s most darkly aggressive material are true, but the fact remains that EP 2 is more than just a continuation of the band’s work. Here you’ll find doom-soaked guitars, furious distortion and harrowing screams rubbing up against seventies synth music and cinematic ambition. The result is nothing short of remarkable, not least because the EP outdoes even Necro Deathmort’s previous efforts. It seems the band have an infinite well of inspiration upon which to draw and these two most recent Eps both benefit from a sense of restraint that ruthlessly emphasizes quality at the expense of quantity. This is the music of genius, dark, arty and unnerving and it deserves the widest possible audience – buy this record today.
