Here’s one for the “two things can be true” files:
- Death metal, in its purest, most feral, regular-assed form, can be the most thrilling, primally satisfying music out there, AND
- Death metal, in its purest, most feral, regular-assed form, can be the most predictable, mathematically formulaic music out there.
The Occult Forces is LP number two from Chile’s Atomic Aggressor, but that slim CV belies a decades’-long history. Atomic Aggressor’s first demo dates all the way back to 1989, which makes it contemporary with Altars of Madness, Severed Survival, and Slowly We Rot. Or another way to put it is… contemporary with death metal as we know it. The band’s first LP didn’t surface until 2014, with Sights of Suffering, an album that yours truly praised (for the very same gosh-darn website your eyeballs are currently pointed at) as “death metal crafted with an appreciation for the purity of the form… [A] glorious celebration of no-nonsense, regular-ass death metal.” Only a four-song EP in 2019 otherwise broke the 12-year silence ended by the arrival of The Occult Forces.
Friends and sainted lovers, you might well be asking, “Hey, is this jamoke ever gonna get down to the business of answering that unspoken question up top?” Well, the report from Atomic Aggressor’s trenches is just as stout and serpentine as ever. The band’s style certainly leans hard to Side Evil rather than Side Gore of Thee Death Metal Record, so these songs cruise along in the fine company of friends like Morbid Angel, Vader, Krisiun, early Kreator, Possessed, and Slayer. About two minutes into the album’s opener, “Souls Degradation,” everything drops out to make space for a grimy bass solo that leads into a thrashing-death breakdown and eventual guitar solo. “The Chalice of Despair” is one of the best tunes here, ripping through a bunch of discrete rhythmic sections with a ferocious attack and plenty of frantic, flailing solos.
The point is, everything here is exactly as it should be, and yet also exactly as you would expect. Riff to riff and minute to minute across this fastidiously jagged album, no single element is ever out of place. But, in a way, that’s also a hindrance to The Occult Forces ever really feeling like it comes into its own. I’m hardly saying I wish Atomic Aggressor was sloppy, but to my particularly bullshitty ears, the obvious confidence and professionalism on display ends up making me feel like I’m watching someone do a full-on restoration of a gleaming car I’ll never drive and didn’t care about in the first place.
That said, sitting in a comfortable armchair alone listening to The Occult Forces on headphones is not the natural habitat for a creature like Atomic Aggressor’s death metal (which is, I feel compelled to remind you, blisteringly good and absolutely no-prefix death metal). What I want is to see these songs in a cramped club, a couple beers deep, uncomfortably warm, and possessed by the ineluctable magick of death metal. When I listen to The Occult Forces from that imagined vantage point, the melodies that seemed rote, the rhythms that felt so worn as to already have become my pulse – all of that dissolves before my eyes, reassembling as the first and finest breath of life.
