Having spent my fair share of time splashing around in the temperate waters of the heavy metal opinionarium, I’ve gotten the acute sense that plenty of fine folks are well and truly murked out. Sure, you love Incantation, and you’re generally in favor of death metal rocketing off into as many manifold perversions as its practitioners can dream up, but perhaps you’ve reached your limit, and you crave a bit more structure, a bit more clarity, or a bit more directness.
Impetuous Ritual, to be perfectly upfront, does not particularly care to change your mind. This is a nearly incontrovertible fact because in 2014, murk like this is a conscious aesthetic choice. In 1989 this sort of scuzz could probably have been attributed to technological limitations; today, it’s a pledge of subterranean allegiance. So, the Australian band’s second album Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence scrapes and gropes and slithers familiarly in the shadows, but even if those moves tickle your pleasure center, the bottom line is always the same: It’s all well and good to suck the listener down into a lightless void of abysmal torment, but c’mon, once you get me there, you’d better DO something.
Thankfully, beneath Impetuous Ritual’s blur and clatter is something approaching real songwriting canniness. As a general comparison, the band was clearly belched from the same humid, decrepit maw as labelmates Vasaeleth and Portal (the latter of which shares two members with Impetuous Ritual), where death metal falls into its own collapsing void. The frequent, flailing leads are unceasingly frantic, as though trying – without much hope – to escape the gravity of the music’s dense lurch.
The crucially important point – and likely the breaking point for you pro- and anti- murkers out there – is that there are riffs a-plenty underneath the scuzz, but they are intentionally difficult to discern. This means that you can engage with the material in whichever way suits you: either as a surface-level sandblasting to be happily endured, or as a rich tapestry of scratchily textured noise which will surely consume you the more effort you give to unraveling it.
Lest I oversell the shrouded aesthetic, though, in many ways this album behaves a whole lot like a “normal” death metal album, particularly as it is entirely littered with squiggly, spidery guitar solos that whip and lash like the paroxysms of a downed power line. Still, it’s the drumming, which alternately chops and batters, that does most of the heavy lifting. The screeching clean vocals halfway through “Inservitude of Asynchronous Duality” are wildly unexpected, and the clang of some buzzing bell or gong on “Metastasis” provides a grim center of gravity for the slowly roiling turbulence. But the album’s real surprise comes in the nine-minute centerpiece “Despair,” which applies Impetuous Ritual’s otherwise “none more murk” aesthetic to the unforgiving doom/death template of such grim scions of yesteryear as Morgion and Disembowelment.
More likely than not, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence will remain willfully impenetrable to many listeners. That’s simply part of the calculation a band like Impetuous Ritual makes, of course. Still, it’s also conceivable that if you’ve been looking for a way to approach the paranoid, alien geometry of a band like Portal, this album could be the bridge that begins to rewire your brain to process all manner of sounds more jagged and depraved.
Here’s the thing, though: Those bells? They will toll either way.
