Christopher Nosnibor
The Dying Hunt is the third album by Static Abyss, who feature Autopsy’s Chris Reifert and Greg Wilkinson. They describe themselves as ‘a monstrous hybrid of twisted, doom-laden brutal death’. And brutal it is.
On this outing, they note the addition of Chad Gailey of fellow death merchants Necrot on drums, and promise an album that ‘plummets the listener again into the festering, psychedelic swamps of lunacy, with the spiralling melodies texturing the relentless savage riffs for an effective nightmare-inducing trip through the sonic abyss. Continuously and relentlessly flitting between brutal passages and hypnotic otherworldly craziness, The Dying Hunt reflects the ailing world and the unravelling of the psyche of its inhabitants in this darkly dystopian landscape, for a masterful descent into sick Death Metal combined with Crust and Doom elements.’
Yeah. That ‘darkly dystopian’ thing… it’s the world we live in now. There’ no escaping it. It’s no longer a fringe thing. environmental disaster isn’t a conspiracy theory. Rogue AI and WW3 are no longer the domain of sci-fi and speculative fiction: governments across Europe are recommending people take peremptory action and are preparing for war. And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is – and I’ve doubtless said this before – is that we’re fucked. I don’t mean this dramatically, or in any way hyperbolically.
On The Dying Hunt, Static Abyss articulate the anxiety over the sense of impending doom through the most rabid, raging, nihilistic blasts of hellish metal imaginable. The first track, ‘Skull Blasted’, is a sub-two-minute blast of scorching, soul-ripping fury. You don’t need the words, you just need to feel the force, and it tears its way through your very being like a wildfire. You feel your inner being scourged away in a mere moment.
And hell, do these mofos bring the riffs – but they also bring some psychedelic weirdness. ‘Lobotomized at Last’ swerves from relentless grind to a rather pleasant passage. It’s one of only a few. ‘Wall of Delusion’ is nothing short of overloading riff-mania, the band launching headlong into a relentless, brutal sonic assault. ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ starts out a bit mor melodic, a bit more liker it’s a lean to the raw, spitting depths. ‘Sinew Leech’ is it’s harsh and it’s brutal and the force and depth of the gut-churning grind only grows as the song and the album progresses. And it’s hellish, harsh, face-melting fury from the get-go. The face-melting ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ is exemplary. The Dying Hunt is relentless is ins riffery. It’s one of those albums that is so heavy it slowly saps the life out of you.
AA
Aural Aggravation 