Obsidian Hooves - 'Sovereignty' (2020)

OBSIDIAN HOOVES - 'SOVEREIGNTY' (2020) - PITCHED AS A ‘journey through dark and rotten corridors to join the ranks of the undead’, Obsidian Hooves is yet another great project from the indefatigably creative Nicholas Turner, whose other outfits include doom band Nothing Is Real and low-fi grinders Moldering Vibration. And this one is so dark that it bleeds hell into the corrupted air around it. After a guitar intro that literally makes you see maggots, ‘Coffin Hole (Revel In Worms)’ hits the ground running, with a filth encrusted sound that brings to mind Autopsy’s ‘Acts Of The Unspeakable’, with its guttural riffs and slaughterhouse growls. Elements imported from Nothing Is Real are strongly evident in the distinctive guitar and drum sound. The latter are authentic and trigger-free, and this has the effect of bringing you into the room with the band, in welcome contrast to the alienating, overproduced gloss you hear so often these days. The dark melodies never become maudlin or tiresome, but are pregnant with threat, like dark clouds crawling across the sky.

‘Death Cult Cartel’ begins with a chaotic scramble of spidery blastbeats, before collapsing into a section of bombastic sludge, with vocals that are arrogantly demonic, like David Vincent on Morbid Angel’s ‘Where The Slime Lives’. By the halfway point the song is marching infernally on like some dark, Satanic mill, with Texorcist's barks describing the logistics of hellish mutilation and torture. Then, just when you think the song is over it gathers up and springs to life like some ghastly revenant, with a solo taken straight from the Trey Azagthoth palette. Turner’s frantic guitar solo sounds like the kind of thing that might raise up demons from the Underworld. ‘Satanic Sovereignty’ kicks off with some catchy but deeply unsettling guitar harmonies, before a scalpel-keen riff starts peeling off your skin and the blast-beating snare pounds you like a fucking mallet. The melody in the middle provides no relief whatsoever from the aural butchery. At a mere 4 minutes, this song is the shortest on the album, and seems to be over far too soon. The genius of Nicholas Turner (aka Tyrant in this band) is that he makes very long songs sound very short.

At first you might think that ‘Coffin Hole’ is the highlight of the album, but, like all the best ones, this album keeps sounding better with every listen. In fact, the best song is the cataclysmically heavy ‘One With The Thing Within’. The riffs here are colossal and awesomely doomy, like the kind of slabs you’d expect to find on a Nothing Is Real album. The doom/death crossover works very well, creating a dense sound that presses you to the ground like a physical weight. The solo here, as elsewhere, is a thing of hair-raising beauty. A sudden burst of speed in the sixth minute builds up to a threatening climax, then gives way to an eerie and sublime acoustic section, fingers flying over the strings in a way that conjures indescribably melancholic visions. The guitar playing everywhere on the album is truly inspired – the work of an explosively versatile imagination combined with classical guitar training. It speaks of darkness and death and psychological terror, painting pictures of dark caverns strewn with bones and choked with the dust of ages.

With ‘Sovereignty’, Obsidian Hooves have made a priceless contribution to the discography of 21^st Century death metal; a contribution that, if there is any justice, will be heard and remembered for as long as the scene endures. If you like any kind of death metal, then you need to hear this.

‘Sovereignty’ comes out on the 17^th July and is available now to pre-order.

 

J.Cooper

Metal Punk Inferno (2020)

Herida Profunda Discography Review

CONCEIVED IN MAY 2012, Herida Profunda (meaning ‘deep wound’ in Spanish) is a four-piece Hardcore/Crust/Grind outfit based in Poland and the UK. In 2013 they unleashed their self-titled debut, followed by a split album with legendary UK thrashers HELLBASTARD in 2015. In 2017 they released a split 7” with London Anarchist crust/powerviolence trio HELLO BASTARDS, followed by last year’s 3 way split with Polish grind veterans PSYCHONEUROSIS and Dutch grind four-piece SUFFERING QUOTA. 

HERIDA PROFUNDA – ‘S/T’ (2013) is a feast of crusty dbeat, with a sound that brings to mind RDP’s ‘Homem Inimigo Do Homem’, with its stomping riffs and throaty, schizoid screaming. It’s noticeable from the outset that the production is near-perfect for the genre. It’s dirty and raw, but at the same time rich and clear, with every instrument powerfully audible. The drum sound is big and authoritative without sounding triggered. The full-throttle bursts of speed are interspersed with bouts of compelling groove on massive slabs like ‘Strach’, which also partakes of the strong industrial influences that are in evidence throughout. You can almost hear the sludgy grinding of rusty machinery on ‘Paraliz’. The vocal play-off between high screams and low growls works very effectively, especially on ‘Dlaczego’ with its erratic stops and starts that give you a chance to hear drummer Jachu’s excellent snare sound. HERIDA PROFUNDA are certainly at their best when they put the pedal to the metal, but the admixture of tempos and moods keeps things interesting. This is the kind of album that keeps you wondering what’s going to happen next, and that’s always satisfying these days. The best song on this gem of an album is probably the dbeat thrasher ‘783’, or the Nazi-killing anthem ‘Pierwsi Do Gazu’, a song that bleeds rage from every pore. This rampage through the gritty engine room of Polish grind/crust ends in a scathing blast of antitheist venom with ‘Wiara Na Sprzedaz’, and if your ears aren’t ringing by the end, then you weren’t playing it loud enough.

HERIDA PROFUNDA/HELLBASTARD – ‘Split’ (2015). Any release featuring these two bands was always going to be a mouth-watering prospect, and this one lives up to expectations right from the very start, when HELLBASTARD’s soft piano intro gives way to the inevitable barrage of bone-crushing metal. HELLBASTARD are rightly hailed as one of the greatest bands in the history of UK thrash metal, and this split catches them at their obnoxious best, with storming old-school riffs and grim, scathing vocals on such toxic chunks of speed as ‘Engineering Human Consciousness’, with its pessimistic samples that crop up like cancerous pustules, and ‘Big Business People’ with its pronounced hardcore groove and thundering double bass drum. ‘Wolfsong’ comes across like a despairing obituary for the decline of humanity, with soaring thrash licks conveying a sense of impending catastrophe before dying away in an echo of a distorted scream. In the course of these four tracks HELLBASTARD blend old-school thrash perfectly with early 90s Hardcore to come up with a relentlessly brutal and uncompromising crustpunk/metal hybrid. The production job might sound a bit dated in places, but they more than make up for this in attitude and aggression, and a sense of disgust and contempt for the world at large.

HERIDA PROFUNDA’s contribution to this split, as well as being more substantial in terms of tracks, is on another level when it comes to speed and fierceness. This is partly because the bands are not of exactly the same genre. A lethal storm of blastbeats in ‘Zjedz Zanim Zgnije’ develops into the sublimely hateful ‘1312’, which interweaves sprinting dbeats with catchy, bass-heavy groove to hammer home the salutary message that cops are, indeed, all bastards. When you hear the furious, staccato snare going like an amphetamine-crazed heart on ‘Ostatnia Chwila’, you’ll have no choice but to bang your head, whereas the merciless ‘Cyrk’ is the sonic equivalent of a blow to the cranium with an iron bar. The song showcases HERIDA PROFUNDA’s attitude to music, and is a perfect example of their restless creativity in that it hardly stands still for a second before plunging off in an unexpected direction, constantly changing speeds and moods to keep any listener guessing. ‘Szmal’ is a more straightforward thrash/death metal chunk, with supremely crushing, chunky riffs from the SLAYER palette and sewage-gargling death metal barks. The highlight of HERIDA PROFUNDA’s ten songs is the frustratingly brief anti-fascist gem ‘Alerta 161’. The whole thing is a rich tapestry of chaotic dbeats and megalithic hardcore riffing, cynically reflecting a world filled with tyranny and terror without mercy or respite. HP end their half of the split with a cover of NAPALM DEATH’s 0.3 second existential epic ‘You Suffer’ – the putrid cherry on top of a particularly bitter cake.

HERIDA PROFUNDA/HELLO BASTARDS – ‘(Split 7”)’ (2017). HP’s opener ‘Refugees Welcome’ is a harrowing song about the plight of refugees from war-torn hellholes who, after fleeing from persecution to the West, will often meet with race-hatred and rejection upon reaching supposed ‘sanctuary’. A SLAYER-style, palm-muted chord gives way to full-on, punishing grindcore riffing topped with Ed’s trademark vocal belching and screaming. Think SLAYER crossed with EXTREME NOISE TERROR. The ‘Need To Grind’ is thoroughly expressed with a simple stenchcore riff, pounding blast beats and gravelly shouts that bring to mind TERRORIZER’s Andy Garcia on ‘World Downfall’. But arguably the finest moment on this whole record is HP’s irreverent but utterly delightful rendition of MOTORHEAD’s classic western-themed ‘Shoot You In The Back’ from the ‘Ace Of Spades’ album. These Anglo-Poles manage to utterly destroy this classic in just under a minute and a half. Behind it all you can just about hear Lemmy and co joyfully spinning in their graves.

HELLO BASTARDS’ half of the 7” technically consists of 6 songs (although in reality there are only two worthy of the name) of grimy, distorted hardcore punk of the old-school. The opener deals with the horror and exploitation inherent in ‘The Sweatshop System’, a CONFLICT-style burst of spit and ire with a strong 80s feel. Next up is a four second, vitriolic expression of the need to ‘Make Hardcore Punk Again’ – a sentiment presumably aimed at the New York Hardcore scene – before the brief crash of obnoxious contempt that is ‘Productive Criticism’. ‘Zapatistas’, a track named after the Mexican left-wing revolutionary Army Of National Liberation, attempts to hammer home its message in all of six seconds. We get another ‘proper song’ at the end in the form of the two minute long ‘Equality’, and here the London Anarchists demonstrate for the second time that they are capable of more than just sloganeering and brief, undeveloped blasts of anger. This record is enough to convey a general idea of what HELLO BASTARDS can do, but it would be nice to hear them spread out a bit more.

PSYCHONEUROSIS/HERIDA PROFUNDA/SUFFERING QUOTA – ‘In Fear We Trust (3 Way Split)’ (2019). The first PSYCHONEUROSIS riff hits like a wall of steel, before giving way to the kind of galloping dbeat that grabs you by the hair and drags you along with it, with some EXTREME NOISE TERROR-style vocals spitting their outrage over everything. In the middle of the rampaging violence of ‘Believe What I Say’, though, flows an intelligent solo, like a thread of colour against the blackness. ‘Where are We Heading’ is an explosive storm of blast beats that stop and start with schizophrenic irregularity, bringing out an satisfyingly tight snare sound. The song is vicious but unfortunately brief.

HERIDA PROFUNDA’s four song offering is a more noisy and crusty affair, with the sound of filthy, begrimed machinery bringing to mind VOIVOD’s early work. ‘Holy Books’ is an RDP-style slice of crusty grind, a brutal slice of South-American style hardcore punk reminiscent of LOBOTOMIA. But HERIDA PROFUNDA’s best song here is the oddly despair-filled ‘Remembrance Day’, which sounds like war itself grinding up the flesh of its victims in jaws of rusty iron. Closer ‘Alerta Antifascista’ is a bullet to the head of the fascist vermin.

SUFFERING QUOTA’s ‘Rage’ is true to its title – a barrage of vitriolic thrash mayhem lasting just under a minute and a half. Their second song of two is more ponderous; the spidery doom beat crawls along with a leaden weight of crusty riffs on its back, before exploding into a burst of savage and relentless violence. Vocalist Gerald is like a rabid dog, totally deranged and frothing for blood. The lyrics here and on ‘Bastardized Yesterday’ are clearly secondary to the expression of hate and psychological agony, in phrasings reminiscent of the late Johnny Morrow from IRON MONKEY. All in all, these two songs are sufficient to show that SUFFERING QUOTA is a band to watch in the future. Keep an eye out for them is you like your thrash/crust dirty and aggressive.

J.Cooper

Copyright Metal Punk Inferno (2020)