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Blight upon Martyred Sentience. The title of the third record by Australian death metal sorcerers, Impetuous Ritual, merits contemplation. Sentience can be taken to mean any kind of life. To be martyred is to have died for some sort of purpose. Martyred Sentience can then be thought of as referring to anything that lives and dies for any sort of purpose or belief. This record is a Blight upon all of that.
It begins like an act of arson: kindling, smouldering. The guitars creep up in the opening seconds like a bad omen flickering in front of your face. Then it catches. The death knell is rung. The full band descends together like a winged demon scorching the ground. Rhythm and meter come and go. "Void Cohesion", the first track, delivers on the promise of its title.
Impetuous Ritual seem to aim at taking death metal to previously unimagined extremes of darkness and depravity. You would be hard pressed to try to find music made with harmonic instruments that turns any notion of harmony so completely inside-out as much as this. It is alien sounding. It is unrelenting. In nine songs over the course of some forty-three minutes, Impetuous Ritual deliver pure sonic madness, demonstrating complete mastery of the cavernous demented style of death metal that they helped to found. The band has once again bested themselves in their pursuit of aural perversion. It's both sadistic and delicious.