In his recent review of the debut album from Greece’s Leatherhead, your pal and mine Zach Duvall praised bands “whose sound can’t remotely be predicted based on the other activities of their members.” In today’s review of the debut album from Norway’s Abhorration, I would like to flip the script and praise bands whose kickass sound can be predicted based on the other kickass activities of their members.
Point is, the past and current pedigree of Abhorration’s four members includes: Condor, Mion’s Hill, Nekromantheon, Obliteration, Deathhammer, Black Magic, and Avmakt. Nearly all of those bands fall somewhere in the realm of black/thrash and death/thrash, though – more importantly – each of them is a card-carrying member of the “Rips Like Total Hell” contingent. Abhorration, you will be pleasantly unsurprised to learn, also rips like total hell. Demonolatry is 36 minutes of lean, mean, to-the-point menace that leans harder on the thrashing death metal side of the fence but keeps the foot 100% on the gas.
The most satisfying thing about Demonolatry is how it lives simultaneously in two spaces. On one hand, everything is extremely meticulous – the instrumental performances are ferociously tight, with each of the many transitions thoughtfully composed and executed in seamless lockstep. But on the other hand, the entire thing bursts with such malevolent energy that it sounds like the band is always on the verge of flying straight off the rails. It’s the sort of energy that comes from a band that knows exactly how shit-hot their songwriting is that they want to leap out of the speaker to shake you by the shoulders and share the besotted glee of how goddamned sick heavy metal can be.
Precedents – are there any? There are many! This is the kind of savage metal that looks backwards down a long hallway of yesterday’s impatiently young demons and races to take its place – and fuck YOU to usurp some if possible. Take your earliest squigglings from Sodom, Slayer, Kreator, Bathory – take them! Shake them up! Do them again, but with your own determination. Abhorration’s death metal piles on the thrash across all aspects, but nowhere so much as how everything comes out in a highly rhythmic, percussive attack. You can hear it in Magnus’s gruff, barking roar, and particularly in Øyvind’s drumming. Check the counterpoint on “Grace of Immolation,” where the punch of tom hits offsets and punctuates gnarly riffing, or the roiling, body-moving groove that opens “Ai Apaec.”
There are occasional whiffs of spikier or more chaotic bands like Katharsis or Khthoniik Cerviiks, but Abhorration’s music is not intended to disorient or overwhelm. Instead, it sounds like they want you to understand every last hook and jab, to memorize each lightning-fast combo as it echoes in your chest cavity like a herd of reindeer tap-dancing a bunch of cuss words in Morse code on your torso. Album opener “Chamber of Agilarept” is an apt demonstration – the first thirty seconds or so are an off-kilter assault, but it quickly falls into a rigorous structure that makes it all the easier to slop you in the giblets. And just when you think you’ve nailed the groove, along comes the 2:56 mark with a hideously great change-up breakdown riff.
Honestly, that’s the whole vibe: “Oh, you thought that part was sweet? Fuck you, WATCH THIS.” Can you think of many better attitudes with which to approach the making of such rude sounds?
