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ALTARAGE - Endinghent
Season of Mist
They wear facial obscuring hoods, play a hideous and brutal formula of suffocating blackened death doom with extreme riff repetitiveness and use layered back cavernous vocals. If you thought I just gave you an exact description of Australia's PORTAL or the half dozen other bands who sound like em this year then you would be half correct.
Here's the second full length by Spain's ALTARAGE a band who last year came out with NIHL. That album was supposed to take the whole previously mentioned template, add some grind, forge it in a blast furnace and shove it into your hype excepting face. Yeah well either I'm jaded or I'm made of pure fuckin steel (I choose the latter since it kinda has a MANOWAR feel to it) because I thought it was average.
Which brings us to Endinghent and for the first part of it ALTARAGE continue where they left off last year. Sure it's a oppressive sounding dissonant wall of PORTAL-esque noise. Then "Cataclysmic Triada" hits and it's like a deluge of destruction has rained upon you. They do it again on the second half of the album with "Orb Terrax". You're already in a comfort zone with the music, if that's possible, and then they grind you down.
It all reminds me of the time I use to work for a company that use to clean up and fix rental properties after the old tenants left, usually not of their own choice. You would walk through the house and see a lot of shit a lot of things fucked up. Then you open up a closet and go "holy fuck, look at this motherfucker." Yeah that's what this release reminds me of.
http://www.season-of-mist.com/
https://altarage.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ALTARAGE/
IMPETUOUS RITUAL - Blight upon Martyred Sentience
Profound Lore Records
This is PORTAL without the masks and let me be clear, after they (PORTAL) released Outre in 2007 the whole blackened noise mystique subsided. Sure people wanna say that IMPETUOUS RITUAL are/were not a extension of PORTAL. Just listen to the music ya fucking mary. Speaking of which, ten years later it's pushing the whole blackened death/noise/drone shtick to the hilt. But as a shit-worker for Profound Lore once told me years ago, "Hey I hate hipsters too but they buy our fucking records and we're making a killing off them."
Yeah well I can't argue with sound business logic and back then I was really hating on hipsters. Nowadays hey, they buy up all the vinyl and keep the good people at labels in business. Now in no way would I call IMPETUOUS RITUAL or PORTAL a bunch of hipsters even though their music is simplistic and worse than drone. I mean they are from Australia. Plus to be a hipster in Australia you would have to be a unemployed office nerd girly man wearing a MEN AT WORK t-shirt, ya know to be ironic. Then you take the fucker out to the Great Barrier Reef and feed em to the sharks.
But anyways IMPETUOUS RITUAL, brother of PORTAL, have not changed much since I first heard their 2009 debut, Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence. Now don't get me wrong, if you're stuck in a musical rut then hey just go for it. Once again this is blackened death, drone, noise, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. Basically they've taken what some USBM acts and Finnish BM bands have done previously, added the chaotic noise factor in and hey you've got (according to their promo) " [the] abhorrent album of the year (in all of metal). Look if you think this is dangerous then try growing a pair of balls, ya marys.
https://www.profoundlorerecords.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ImpetuousRitual/
https://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/blight-upon-martyred-sentience
