Those folks at Relapse have done it again. Armed with suitably apocalyptic artwork, an intro track that is a crazed fusion of prog technicality and heavy metal might, Spawn of possession have delved deep indeed to produce this monstrosity of a third album and it’s one that may prove the highlight of your Spring if you’re into crushing percussion, blistering fret work and vocals dredged from the earth’s very core.
Opening with ‘abodement’, an all-too-brief instrumental, the band set the scene with an atmospheric piece of work that only hints at the searing technicality to be found on ‘where angels go demons follow’, a track that takes the blazing mastery of the guitar by acts such as Opeth as a jumping off point and then ups the ferocity several notches to craft a juddering, impossibly convoluted body of work that sits somewhere between Meshuggah, Opeth, Dillinger Escape Plan and label-mates the Alchemist. It is a dizzying opening track with little in the way of conventional melody to hang your hat on, and yet the band have successfully held it altogether so that it does make some twisted kind of sense, the more carefully you listen. ‘Bodiless sleeper’ pulls a similar trick, the pulverising guitars rampaging over a percussive assault that is surely played by an octopus on steroids. These two tracks, however, prove to be nothing more than a teaser for the near-ten-minute master-work that is ‘the evangelist’, a work of stunning ambition and complexity that takes in death metal, progressive and even classical influences to create something that is symphonic in nature but yet utterly unlike anything that has been dubbed ‘symphonic’ thus far (the term here refers rather to the way the music ebbs and flows through moods and passages than to denote the use of an orchestra to embellish standard hard rock tenets). It is a remarkable work from a band honed to perfection by months of practice and determination and it is no surprise that it took the band some five years to actually record this album. With its crazed baroque passages and steely riffing, ‘the evangelist is surely the album’s dark centrepiece, and with ‘servitude of souls’ Spawn of possession opt for a more straight out metal track (although the bass runs that introduce the track are still quite phenomenal ), although what SOP cosider straight forward may be rather more convoluted than your typical death metal band. Ferocious and unforgiving, it captures the band in full flight, technical and yet sacrificing nothing in the way of power, it recalls the wonders of Emperor’s final album ‘Prometheus – the discipline of fire and demise’, another album that spanned the divide between classical music and metal with unerring determination and technical skill.
‘Deus Avertat’ fades in with a pummelling riff before backwards guitar stabs introduce an entirely unique edge to proceedings making you doubt the sanity of these none-more-capable Swedes. And yet, fears for the band’s sanity aside, as before no matter how technical things get, SOP’s innate skill is to make sure that everything coalesces at the right moment, the music never robbed of its power by an obsession with fret-board masturbation and yet still fiendishly proficient enough that it leaves most listeners with their jaws on the floor as the band bust out another riff destined to make the average guitarist’s fingers bleed. ‘Spiritual deception’ is another frenzied track dedicated to bringing about a total eclipse of the sun with a central riff of such ferocity that it raises gooseflesh just listening to it. ‘No light spared’ is the blackness personified, opening with huge swathes of gothic organ, the absence of guitar in the intro is as effective as its over-representation elsewhere in the track, with organ, piano and strings all combined to make an utterly remarkable piece of music. It once again reasserts that classical music and extreme metal are far from incompatible and anyone doubting the artistic merit of extreme music need only hear this to understand that they are surely mistaken. Along with ‘the evangelist’ this is a massive highpoint of a remarkable album and it goes only further in convincing the listener that SOP are geniuses in their field. The final track – ‘apparition’ was absent from our review copy – but ‘no light spared’ acts as a fine conclusion to a remarkable album.
Music this technical will always leave some fans cold. The music is complex, initially hard to penetrate and comprehend, but with work it clearly demonstrates those same qualities which Emperor were so impressively working towards at the time of their demise. This is death metal as extreme as it comes, but it is also progressive and even neo-classical and the pristine production job doesn’t do any harm either. This is extreme metal as high art and it deserves to be heard far and wide – a fine release indeed and a highlight in death metal’s already packed release schedule, don’t let this one pass you by.
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