Nowadays, any extreme band has as main objective to sound the deepest and most intense, especially if we speak of Death-Metal of more obscure contours, like Ulcerate.
In fact, and if things look good, it almost became a kind of cliché for the style to pick up on the power of bands like Immolation, Gorguts, add any more demonic component with some production tricks, to turn into any Demon out of the Necronomicon.
The way I started to write this review which targets the new album by the New Zealanders Ulcerate will highlight, in fact, only half of the bands pointed above since I withdraw the theatricality, and sums up what is the sonority of the band or, in other words, what these bands should sound like so they won’t fall into the increasingly monotonous sense of “I’ve heard it last week.”
First, by the terrific quality of the trio, concerning the way they construct / disrupt the sonic wall where dissonances of the movement continue to be shattered and where layers are applied, which recalls, slightly, of what bands like Zhrine create in slower moments, proving that nowadays both leaders and followers consume each other.
The band, step-by-step, has built a career that is becoming more imposing and if the previous albums always maintained the same level of quality, in this new record they manage to overcome the previous in several aspects, mainly in the thick aura of blackness that surrounds the listener as well as How it combines technicality with brutality, originating a kind of sound aberration, born from the womb of some Gojira mixed with the environment of Morbid Angle’s “Hatework”.
This description may seem bizarre, but believe me it’s one of the things that stands out most in the midst of this whirlwind … But when you start and create based on Gorguts’ Obscura, you add dissonant elements from Deathspell Omega, the clearer and technicality of some Immolation and where the riffs feel like tentacles out of a black hole where it boils the most visceral Post Black Metal, the monster rises before us… More, when the creators are excellent musicians, then this gains contours of extreme elegance.
Much of the ambiance present in some of the Icelandic projects so in vogue today comes from here. Extreme music is like this: to evolve and to reformulate and this is the new album of the New Zealander’s Ulcerate.
