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MALIGNER
Attraction To Annihilation

Blood Harvest (2018)
Rating: 8/10

And so the Blood Harvest roster spews forth another venomous heavy metal act. This time in the form of Maligner, a trio who come adorned in denim ‘n’ leather and heavily armed with a debut full-length album sure to not just turn heads, but sever them.

Maligno (vocals and bass), Aztiak (guitar) and Ertheb Somus-Ra (drums) are from Malmö, but if you think this opus is going to be riddled with Swedish familiarities then think again because Attraction To Annihilation has more in common with the nasty and scathing old school death-thrash outbursts than the expected Stockholm sound mimicry.

Attraction To Annihilation comes all guns blazing, spraying bullets everywhere as the rampant trio devastates and pummels with high speed assaults that come across as a destructive mix of Possessed, Teutonic flares, Dark Angel, later Death, blackened death-cum-thrash, and just about anything else that fizzes, boils and rages within such spectrums.

Maligner is a full-throttle act of the modern age, but one fast and furious and not averse to technical flashes. But for the most part this one just rages like hot flaming lava; the main theme being immense thrashy rumbles which veer into death metal streaks.

If you didn’t experience the band’s 2016 Demon EP then I suggest you just jump headfirst into this pit of sniping, writhing snakes. The album features eight snappy tracks which grumble through sturdy riffing before the frequent sprints cause severe dizziness as ‘Oath-Bound’ drips into ‘Lust For Fire’ and then into ‘Disposable’. The next thing you know 30-minutes of your life have flashed by and you’re left with extreme whiplash from a batch of hostile compositions that are delivered brisk and brash.

Led by Maligno’s salivating rasps, the threesome are not doing anything out of the ordinary, but within their hectic framework their conniving and spiteful thrash expressions are more than admirable, laced with killer fiery melodies and sizzling magma bass lines, while Ertheb’s drums are hyper blasts of considerable speed and precision.

One of the shortest tracks on the album is ‘Salvation’; a bewildering fury that pretty much sums up the energy and anger on the record. This is about as abrupt and demented as it gets – top notch hellish death / thrash with a segment change that batters us with a hard ‘n’ seething gallop. Meanwhile, ‘Reign Of Fear’ is delivered with militant precision, almost beginning like a classic Sodom track as a devious solo navigates its way through the debris and the drums charge like a fleet of tanks before the hyper meltdown comes to the fore.

‘Beyond Repair’ follows with menace; this time the speed is reduced to a mid-tempo thunder groove, but technicality becomes present with a jarring rhythm and cogent vocal spits. With this one Maligner remind me of Sadus, only with extra beef. And the frenzy and toxic energy continues with the hasty ‘Mental Breakdown’, where the trio terrorise our brain cells and ear canals with a blistering array of accelerations that stink of the 80s in certain departments but remain clean and tight in order to adhere to contemporary rules.

But it all still makes for a blustery listen as closer ‘Into Oblivion’ comes trudging with arrogance and swagger on a punchy riff and those fully cranked drums. Maligner are stocked with so much ammunition that every strike is deadly, no doubt then that a flurry of frothing thrash fans will become attracted to this spectacle of utter annihilation.

Neil Arnold

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