Scorn Coalescence - Serpents Athirst / Genocide Shrines / Trepanation / Heresiarch

By Bryan Camphire. Cyclopean Eye Productions, a label out of Bangalore, present Scorn Coalescence, a four-way split of blistering death metal. The first two bands hail from Singapore, while the latter two are native to New Zealand.

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Roger Moore.

Cyclopean Eye Productions, a label out of Bangalore, present Scorn Coalescence, a four-way split of blistering death metal. The first two bands hail from Sri Lanka, while the latter two are native to New Zealand. Taken together, the songs capture death metal's potential to be momentous and captivating, the kind of release that you wish was twice as long.

First up is "Poisoning the Seven", by Serpents Athirst. The song feels like an anthem from its opening bars. A minute in, they ratchet up the intensity and the tempo, recalling the relentless death metal of early 2000s Brazilian acts like Rebaelliun and Abhorrence. There is an urgent intensity to the emotions on display here. The track is brimming over with malevolence in its smoldering attack.

Genocide Shrines darken the mood with, "All and/or Nothing". The bass is at least as loud as the guitars and its bombast spews forth with the relentlessness of a Gatling gun. The whole cut is the sound of being ground to a paste on concrete underfoot. Yet for all its teeming antipathy, the music is also painstakingly measured and precise. Its explosiveness is calculated, set off with iron-fisted control.

Trepanation slow things down on "B/H/T". Just when you feel like you're on solid footing vocals and blast beats are thrown over your head and tied tight with rope, as you're tossed into the trunk of a car. The music careens along in fits and starts. When things slow down, an accompanying feeling of dread sets in as you anticipate the violence around the next corner, forced to manage the suspense and catharsis.

Heresiarch close off the split with "Dread Prophesy", a coughing erratic piece of death metal. Fast, confident and careening, it shows how the band's prowess for detailed sprawling death metal takes no prisoners in its assault. Frequent rhythm changes beg repeated listens while sacrificing none of the music's immediacy.

The record as a whole vouches for these four bands' abilities to convey destruction and death distilled into a unique powerful display. This release should leave little room for doubt that this is an era of strong uncompromising death metal. Coming from four bands from extreme ends of the underground, Scorn Coalescence is a vitally concentrated offering.

Heresiarch - Death Ordinance

By Bryan Camphire. Dark Descent Records does it again, delivering another dose of uncompromising apoplectic death metal. Death Ordinance, the debut full length by Heresiarch, is a a forty-one minute set of nine tracks

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Mistanthropic-Art

Dark Descent Records does it again, delivering another dose of uncompromising apoplectic death metal. Death Ordinance, the debut full length by Heresiarch, is a a forty-one minute set of nine tracks with zero clean parts and zero concessions made. The result is unrelenting evil ripping through your speakers.

Heresiarch play chaotic blackened death metal full of aggression and hate. The band hails from New Zealand, home to some of the most terrifying acts working in metal today; bands like Vesicant, Sinistrous Diabolous, Vassafor, Diocletian and Solar Mass. Heresiarch seem to be quite at home among this cantankerous lot. Don't let the tank treads on the cover fool you, though: this is music for sensitive souls. I am being facetious there. This music sounds like getting run over by that tank.

At the risk of sounding reductive, it should be said that this music is indebted to some fearsome Canadian bands like Revenge and Conqueror. To this hellish mix, Heresiarch add extra heaps of filth and dissonance, following along the darkened path laid before them by such devilish bands from down under like Bestial Warlust, Sadistik Exekution and, more recently, acts like Impetuous Ritual. That is a lot of name-dropping. Suffice to say, Heresiarch exist within a tradition of some of the most punishing acts in extreme metal. What they may lack in originality, they make up for in entropy.

For me what shines most about this recording is the production. Death Ordinance sounds humongous. Every instrument is given ample space. This is no easy feat with music that is as suffocating as this. A lot of great bands simply do not manage to sound their best on record. The fact that each amp sounds like it's been turned up to eleven, the drummer is playing his guts out throughout, and the screams still manage to be harrowing on top of all of this... it's impressive. It makes you marvel at what a vicious beast this band must be to behold in the flesh.

The third cut, "Harbinger" is a highlight for me. I am a total sucker for half-time hardcore-style breakdowns in death metal. All the better if these mosh-worthy moments are sandwiched between breakneck blastbeats, as happens to be the case here. The deviations from a straight up 4/4 approach really sweeten the deal here, as well as on several other cuts throughout the LP.

There is a nice variety of tempo over the course of the record, and this keeps the songs from blending together. The song lengths range from as short as two minutes to as long as over seven minutes, and it's precisely this type of variety that makes this set unpredictable and engrossing. All in all, Death Ordinance marks another solid entry in the Dark Descent catalog by a true force to be reckoned with. All hail Heresiarch.