Following last year’s Labyrinth of Veins, the dastardly duo of Chris Reifert (Autopsy) and Greg Wilkinson (Autopsy / Deathgrave) are back with more sickness in the guise of death / doom / crust nightmare Static Abyss. Recorded at the aptly named Earhammer Studios, with Greg expertly handling engineering, mixing and mastering, Aborted From Reality offers eleven new tracks of twisted, old-school metal, once again asserting Chris and Greg’s place at the rotting pinnacle of extreme metal.
The album kicks into gear with the scything, multi-tracked riff of the title track, a ferocious death metal assault dominated by Chris’ oh-so-familiar vocals. With doom influences slithering into view as the band slow the pace for a gruelling, mid-song trudge to the very gates of hell, it’s a strong opener, setting a high bar for the album that follows. Fortunately, the next track is the recently released single Wormskinned, a surprisingly accessible, even hypnotic, piece of music that showcases a versatility the band frequently like to obscure beneath the casual veneer of brutality that runs across the album. An early highlight, Wormskinned is a weirdly catchy, gloriously evil track – and it has an awesome video from longstanding Peaceville artist Matthew Vickerstaff, which you can see below. Next up, the delightfully titled Cathedral of Vomit sidesteps into pure doom, its funereal pace and scabrous vocals evoking the ancient stone and harrowing atmosphere of some desecrated and long-abandoned holy site. Snapping you out of your reverie, Cerebral Ghost trades tension for turmoil, the track sitting comfortably in the realm of Autopsy, with its blistering riff and harsh screams. It’s followed by the psychedelic nightmare that is Mind Tentacles, a short piece that shifts from traumatic sludge fest to gut saw thrash in just under three-minutes, before the brief explosion of Poisoned Limbs rounds out the first side, with one-minute of unrepentant rage.
Opening the album’s second half, the schizophrenic Horizon of Cremains makes sudden unhinged shifts in style and tempo, wrongfooting the listener and basking in an air of unpredictability. Another track with a seriously potent groove, for all its sudden stabs into death territory, Crosses and Coffins, highlights the band’s unholy knack for penning material that sticks in the mind for all its fire and fury. Keeping things dynamic, Unrepentant Mutant Serpent is another trawl through the darkest recesses of the human mind, the leaden pace only adding to the aura of decay the band so gleefully evoke and, if the sub-one-minute lightning bolt of Dehumanized serves to briefly shake the listener out of their torpor, it is the crushing weight of The Static Abyss that finally removes all vestiges of hope, slowly burying the listener under riffs that owe more to the crawling strings of countless horror soundtracks than anything in the metal firmament. It is a finale that trembles under an immense burden of despair, and it raises goosebumps on the arms as it progresses to its horrifying conclusion.
Chris Reifert is an artist who never disappoints. His passion for the form is unending, his ability to craft a mix of the chilling and the catchy unparalleled. It probably goes without saying that, if you like Autopsy, you will enjoy The Static Abyss, but it is nevertheless its own entity. With a greater emphasis on the crawling horror of doom, there’s a dynamic to the album’s ebb and flow that is irresistible, while the eponymous final track is nothing short of an extreme metal / horror movie masterpiece that genuinely causes the skin to crawl. Not for the faint of heart, Aborted from Reality, is a harrowing trip into the abyss and, while tracks like Wormskinned may offer a certain relief, the overall journey is into a heart of darkness. You have been warned. 9/10
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