Ferocious, technically-minded death-core is rarely this brutal, but Rings of Saturn have done a fantastic job of combining devilish riffage, guttural vocals and progressive extravagance into one beguiling package. ‘Ultu Ulla’ is the band’s fourth studio album since they burst onto the scene with 2010’s ‘embryonic anomaly’, and it marks a considerable leap forward in terms of the band’s exquisitely dextrous musicality.
Opening with the sweeping majesty of ‘Servant of this sentience’, Rings of Saturn waste no time in beating their listener into a sweaty pulp with djent-ish guitars vying with prog-infused shredding for supremacy and, at the heart of it all, Ian Bearer’s unhinged vocals scraping away at the nerve-endings. ‘Parallel shift’ has a demonic groove that screams out of the blackness, matching ‘Yolo’-era Suicide Silence for sheer frantic catchiness, whilst Lucas Mann’s synth elements add a spacey dimension to proceedings that is as welcome as it is unique. So, what weren’t you expecting next? Flamenco? Not to worry, Rings of Saturn have you covered with the short, utterly bizarre interlude of ‘Unhallowed’ before ‘Immemorial essence’ arrives to tear you a new one. With its deranged fretboard runs recalling the early days of Dillinger Escape Plan, ‘Immemorial essence’ is a monument to technical ecstasy only for the intro to ‘the relic’ to play out like an eight-bit computer game soundtrack. Of course, it’s only an intro and just as you start to wonder if the band haven’t gone off their collective, Commodore 64-infused rockers, down comes a riff that will smash your teeth clean in.
With your brain already melting into a primordial soup and leaking out from between your ears, the last thing you’re likely to need is the stop-start antics of ‘Margidda’, the aural equivalent of one of those funfair rides that sends you hurtling up into the sky only to bring you screaming back down to earth when you least expect it. With mechanistic double kick and huge, Meshuggah-aping riffs it’s a guaranteed head fuck but that’s OK because the cosmic mentalism of ‘Harvest’, a cast-off carnival sideshow, is only around the corner and it’s apt to leave you staring into the mirror and drooling forever. The album’s longest track, ‘The macrocosm’ is both an instrumental and also the most expansive piece of music on offer, moving effortlessly from picked guitar to death-core monstrosity before segueing into a full-blown progathon that sounds like Joe Satriani going head-to-head with Dream Theater. The spirit of Dillinger is raised once more with the enthusiastic runs of ‘prognosis confirmed’ before ‘inadequate’, which may possibly be Rings of Saturn’s withering assessment of their peers’ musical ability, brings the album to a close, leaving the listener to lie, sweating, upon the floor looking like Jack Nicholson after his final, disastrous encounter with Nurse Ratched.
‘Utta Ulla’ is not for the faint of heart. A searing pinnacle of the death-core movement, it stands tall in a field of one, Rings of Saturn having cleared away the opposition by being more progressive, more brutal and, to be frank, more fucking nuts than all the others. Yet, for all the insanity, Rings of Saturn never forget the value of a great riff or the sheer ecstasy of head banging and there are plenty of examples of the former and opportunities for the latter sprinkled liberally through the album like a fine cosmic dust. I’m too damn tired to know if I like ‘Utta Ulla’ yet, but goddam it’s an awe-inspiring piece of work! 9
