Style: Black metal, war metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: The utter destruction of all things the light touches
Thoughts: War... war never changes... but the music about it does. War metal is a genre that I never really bothered to look into until a few years ago. I had always heard it was the black metal version of brutal death metal and that did not interest me in the slightest. It wasn't until I heard Archgoat that things took a slight shift.
First I didn't know that Archgoat played war metal. In my mind they were blacking death/black metal... which wasn't too far off, but just slightly awry of the bullseye. One of my buddies told me that they were war metal and it piqued my interest.
Turns out war metal is more than just "brutal death metal played in black metal." That's such a bad description that I find myself shying away from it actively now. War metal feels more like primitive black metal played in a cave... with a gorilla on vocals... and the top three strings missing off the guitars.
Cult of Extinction plays a modern take on the style. I picked up the album because it was ten bucks and the cover looked cool as hell. The music inside the album matches nearly to perfection.
This is a chaotic mess played at maximum speed. The guitars are tuned low and have quite a bit of reverb on them. This gives them a huge and open feel as they play the mess of notes they call riffs. Really though, this is more like a collection of random notes most of the time rather than proper riffs... and that's a good thing.
The music comes across as incredibly hard to follow and intentionally inaccessible. There are only a few moments during the whole album where there is any sort of melody or anything but the constant thumping of the guitars and drums. It's cool as hell.
Thirty minutes later everything is over and silence graces my speakers once again. Ritual in the Absolute Absence of Light is just about perfect in its play time. Anything more would overstay its welcome, anything less would have me wanting more. It's not going to be an album that I pull out very often, but when I feel like I want to be obliterated by my sound system, this is certainly on the short list of albums to go to.
Written July 2nd 2024
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