Posts Tagged ‘Brutality’

Slaughterday – Dread Emperor

Posted: 15 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Testimony Records – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

When I first started Aural Aggravation – kinda by stealth, with no fanfare – back in October 2015, with a review of Philip Jecks’ Cardinal, it was with a view to using the platform to break away from more conventional and comparatively short-form reviews to indulge in more personal, reflective, essay-type analysis. But with a bursting inbox and a desire to provide coverage to as many acts as possible, sometimes it’s not always appropriate to spend hours and column inches pondering the context and the content through a framework that sits between reception theory and gonzo journalism. More to the point, there simply aren’t enough hours.

Slaughterday is an old-school death metal duo, and Dread Emperor is their sixth album. They promise ‘crushing doom-ridden ultra-heavy parts to calculated outbreaks of utter brutality,’ and cite as lyrical inspirations ‘H. P. Lovecraft and other masters of horror’. They go on to add, ‘while sinister things crawl and creep through the duo’s timeless brutality, they have always portrayed them with a sinister flair of their own. These days, the band has repurposed those monstrous creatures as metaphorical ciphers for relevant contemporary topics’.

Titles such as ‘Rapture of Rot’, ‘Necrocide’, ‘Obliteration Crusade’ and ‘Astral Carnage’ speak for themselves, and the ‘crushing’ ‘doomy’ aspects they focus on in their pitch are very much to the fore: ‘Enthroned’ lifts the curtain with some slow, heavyweight riffery, and paves the way for the rabid attack of ‘Obliteration Crusade’.

That bands which blast out frenetic guitar mayhem at a thousand miles an hour with impenetrable growls and howls by way of vocals go to lengths to sell the merits of the lyrical content is something which is a source of vague amusement – I mean, as if you could make out a single word by ear. But it’s beside the point, really: as I’ve touched on before, it’s about the conveyance of sentiment, the implication of meaning.

On Dread Emperor, Slaughterday leap and lurch from bowel-bursting heavyweight sludge-trudge to flamboyant pirouettes on the frets. As they say themselves, they ‘deliver everything that they excel in, which is also precisely what their fans want from the duo’: as such, it’s no criticism to say that Dread Emperor ticks genre boxes, because it’s mission accomplished for the band. And it’s hard to argue otherwise. Dread Emperor delivers riff after riff, drives hard, brings the heavy and snarls, growls and spits its way with gut-churning malevolence from beginning to end.

AA

AA

a1341187244_10

Total Annihilation – Mountains of Madness

Posted: 1 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Testimony Records – 16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Four albums in twenty years isn’t a particularly impressive work-rate, but I’m assuming that liker the majority of bands, the members of Total Annihilation have not only day jobs, but families and all of the stuff that adults tend to. The fact that they’ve managed to continue making music – and earned themselves both a fanbase and level of reputation – is no small feat, and is a testament to their commitment to making music. This seems to be where a lot of people lose their way in life, and end up feeling bitter and unfulfilled, accepting the process of succumbing to the drudgery of capitalist structures, and becoming increasingly resentful of the way that parenting and domesticity take over. These guys clearly have no shortage of rage, but it’s not over how their lives have turned out, and of course, they have an outlet – a substantial outlet driven by heavy guitars and pounding hell-for-leather percussion… a healthy outlet. It’s an observation I’ve made before that metal gigs are some of the friendliest, least threatening, environments I’ve experienced, and the more extreme the metal, the nicer the folks. There are always exceptions, as the 90s Norwegian black metal scene evidenced, but by and large… extreme metal channels those difficult emotions, the anger, the rage, the hatred.

Mountains of Madness promises ‘all the Swiss precision and trademark elements their following has come to expect of them but also with more of everything: more tempo and serious speed, more brutality, more power, more thrash, more death but also more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality!’

I’m not entirely sure that what we want from a death metal album is ‘more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality’: me, I want more grunt, more grind, more attack, more brutality. May be I just like punishment, maybe I just want music that bludgeons and batters, maybe I seek catharsis through sonic violence.

The blurbage also informs us ‘There are also more tentacles, more jaws, more razor-sharp teeth, more twisted mutation, and definitely more evil! Talking about tentacles, the album title points already towards the famous cosmic horror novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936) by American gothic author H. P. Lovecraft, who has been a constant source of inspiration for the metal scene in general and TOTAL ANNIHILATION in particular…

Yet for Total Annihilation all this horror is not just escapism for entertainment but it serves a meaningful purpose. The album is permeated by a deep moral disgust and burning anger towards all the evil and reckless destruction that humanity forces onto itself and all other forms of life on this planet and earth itself. Mountains of Madness is conceived as an echo of and a bold manifesto about the state of the world as well as an artistic sign of our time.’

And there it is: it’s hard to argue, if you have any sense if the current state of the world, that we’re fucked. The question at this point seems to be less ‘will humans become extinct?’ and more ‘will we become extinct through war or climate change?’

‘The Art of Torture’ brings the rage in frenzied blast of beats, riffery, and raw-throated vocals. there is, of course, the obligatory monster solo which occupies the majority of the second half of the song, but the title track brings an instant shift. Yes, it’s very much driven by dingy guitars and pulverising drumming, but it snarls into the abyss and is gnarly and heavy, and while there are some bursts of obligatory fretwankery which feel very much template-driven, it brings the weight – before ‘Chokehold’ grinds in hard, overloading volume and thick distortion paired with rapidfire double-pedal drumming and some wild harmonic guitar soloing.

Mountains of Madness hits hard. Across the eleven tracks, Total Annihilation bring riffs galore, and while there is melody in the lead guitar parts, it’s hardly tuneful in the conventional sense. The sound is solid, the bass and guitar both chunky, the drums blasting, and the pace and rabidity seem to increase as the album progresses.

AA

207139

Unsane – Sterilize

Posted: 3 September 2017 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Southern Lord – 29th September 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been five years since Wreck appeared on Alternative Tentacles. So what have Unsane been doing in the intervening period? Gazing at their navels, taking up yoga and discovering a serene spirituality as a means of dealing with the anguish of life in the modern world? As if. They’ve been distilling their brutal rage into even more intensely bleak slabs of sonic nihilism. And, naturally, it’s housed in appropriately unsubtle, gore-soaked artwork. Unsane’s album covers are nothing if not distinct: while so many metal album covers which display hematomaniac tendencies are highly stylised and revel in the intended shock value, Unsane’s covers are all the more shocking by view of their clinicality, resembling crime scene photos than works of art. This is in many ways true of the music itself: there’s a functionality, a bluntness about it, and no sense of there being any indulgence or show.

Everything about Sterilize is stark, uncompromising, and connotes post-industrial, post-everything society, the dehumanising effects of merely trying to exist in the capitalist world where everyone gets pushed further and further down for the benefit of the few. It’s the soundtrack to life being sucked from the soul, the sonic encapsulation of desolate fury.

The grey steel assault of ‘Factory’ sets the tone and tempo: screeching feedback whistles through the grey, grain of the guitars and sludgy bass. From thereon in, the ferocious howls of anguish and packed in tight, back-to-back.

The song titles are also functional, direct, descriptive. Again, there’s no fluff, and little joy, to be found around ‘We’re Fucked’, ‘A Slow Reaction’ or ‘Distance’. Everything is paired back to the bare essentials and compacted for maximum impact. This includes the blues-based sound that defines Unsane: it’s crunched up, compressed, stomped into submission, meaning that while there is a certain swing to it, it’s limited to the most concise and precise form.

‘The Grind’ is aptly titled and brings a thunderous deluge of guitar; ‘Aberration’ is built around a simple four-chord trudge; and ‘No Reprieve’ sums up the album as a whole. You don’t listen to Unsane for variety, either across a given album, or their output overall. You listen to Unsane to vent, to experience a relentless viscerality. There’s something almost self-flagellatory about listening to an Unsane album in its entirety. At a certain point, the initial sense of catharsis is replaced by a crushing claustrophobia. This isn’t to say it’s an unpleasant experience, but is indicative of the effect of such sustained intensity. It’s as exhausting, mentally and physically, as the exertions of daily life on the treadmill, a punishment as reward.

When they slow the pace a shade, the weight is turned up, and when they hit a groove, it’s explosive and blistering. The tripwire guitar that stretches its sinews over the sludgy trudge of ‘Lung’ only raises the tension, and closer ‘Avail’ draws a heavy curtain of screaming anguish on proceedings with distorted vocals tearing across a rumbling bassline and savage guitars.

There’s a desperation and urgency about Sterilize which ensures that it crackles from beginning to end. Everything seethes, spits and scrapes and there’s not a moment’s relief. It’s this intensity which makes Sterilize as strong as any Unsane release. It’s mercilessly harrowing, but is ultimately satisfying in a perverse, sadistic sense.

AAA

hi3000x3000RGB