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ACT OF IMPALEMENT
Perdition Cult

Caligari / Unspeakable Axe (2018)
Rating: 8.5/10

Coming with more crust than Satan’s own loaf of bread is Act Of Impalement; the sort of hideous hybrid band that can so easily churn out vile heaps of grinding crust one minute and the next cough up a doomy, death metal cyst of drudgery.

Perdition Cult is another of my favourite albums to emerge in 2018, the guys behind it – Ethan “Dark Druid” Rock (vocals and guitars), James “Jimmy” de Rais (bass) and Zack “Vlad” Ledbetter (drums) – making such a hideous sound as black, sodden waves of sludging doom marry up with guttural death metal nuances before a sudden tide of black-cum-death thrashing interrupts.

Nashville, Tennessee is the home of this trio, and it’s certainly taken them a while to get this debut opus on the racks. Now it’s here though, I can’t praise it enough, the threesome constructing monolithic slabs of stinking slop before injecting their mass of burnt decay with blistering expressions of thrash.

Opener ‘Smoldering Out Of Existence’ begins in morose fashion, but soon speeds up into a chaotic feeding frenzy before suddenly resorting to a blackened, smouldering scowl – the vocals shifting from rotten rasps to deathly bellows before an almost punky, crust-coated riff brings us back to the galloping slog.

Act Of Impalement dishes out buckets of wet dirt as ‘Disembowelment Rituals Of Moloch’ begins its timely, atmospheric trudge; the silted riffs churn and boil to a slow-motion bellow and then we’re off again, succumbing to a blast of murky speed with a caustic, black metal casing. Then the bass shifts into a truly despondent rattle, almost like a rib-cage struggling to deal with the depths of pneumonia.

‘Draugr’ opts for hyper blasts of aggression and utmost speed. This is sickening black / death bluster at its fastest and most primeval, but always lurking within is that air of funeral doom built upon a solitary drum nod and that clanking bass din.

Highlights are aplenty. The squalid ‘Ruins Of Sarnath’ again hints at that remote, frenzied horror brimming with dank quality and mushy chugging, and ‘S.L.R (Sadistic Lycanthropic Rage)’ features a killer damp lead before the track embarks on a hellish, thrashing velocity – the ghoulish gallop a truly bleak and nauseous black metal trudge. Meanwhile, ‘Eternal Flame – Eternal Bliss’ features a high pitched wail from Ethan Rock before we’re mashed to pieces in a crippling blast of speed and Swedish-styled chainsaw toil.

Closer ‘Cthonic’ tightens its hold by bringing blacker, billowing death-thrash to the table as another eye-gouging groove meanders through the belching brutality. That’s the key here; the catchy and ultra-heavy structures grind like well-soiled cogs that leak into their own quicksand psyche, bringing to the fore what is essentially an engaging match up of styles, and all of which succeed in what is a nightmarish experience for the listener.

Neil Arnold

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