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AUSTERYMN
Sepulcrum Viventium

Memento Mori (2015)
Rating: 9/10

St. Helens and Wigan in the North West of England is probably the last place you’d expect an extreme metal band to come from one, and yet here we have Austerymn. The band consists of four members, namely; vocalist / guitarist Rik Simpson, lead guitarist Stuart Makin, bassist / vocalist Steve Critchley, and drummer Nikk Perros.

Sepulcrum Viventium is the debut full-length offering from the group, following on from the 2013 EP In Death… We Speak. The new album offers up 12 tracks, beginning with a brief intro before plunging us into ‘Feeding The Grotesque’. It begins in ominous fashion – a grizzly vocal gargle and sinister chord laced with dark thudding drums – and then we’re scooped up in the arms of some skeletal marauder and dragged into the foggy mire of the grave.

Austerymn already has me hooked, but with that added ghoulish gallop I’m propelled back to the early 90s death metal scene – engulfed by the silt of Grave and splattered with the melancholic mud of Autopsy.

‘Feeding The Grotesque’ is a mighty fine statement to start a record with, the vocals sending chills down the spine as the leads worm their way like maggots munching on a decomposing carcass. At times quintessentially British, ‘Feeding The Grotesque’ has mastered the art of taking that creaky old classic sound and wrenching it into the modern era, but never once is such vintage fustiness compromised. The guitar sound remains as stuffy as the tomb as the bass meanders through the murk.

This is classy mid-tempo death metal, the sort I continually crave amidst the slurry of all too polished pretenders, but then there’s always that fear that after such a great start a band will weaken. This isn’t the case with the sordid ‘Written In The Scars’; a track which ups the pace and rumbles like a well-soiled and war-torn Bolt Thrower cauldron of zombified remains and human ash. Over the years Austerymn has experimented with varying styles, but as the promo sheet for this record states, the band was eager to get back to its roots, and that’s something they’ve done to their benefit.

‘Written In The Scars’ boasts the same squelching moodiness as Carcass; the guitar is clinical and cutting, and yet the blade of the weapon remains infected with gunge. When the melodies come they are magnificent, brooding and fiendishly metallic – the solo battles its way through the mouldy darkness, while Perros’ drums remain potent in the gloom.

‘Bleeding Reality’ begins with a foetid trudge; one can hear the goo and slop dripping from the strings as the bass and drums plunder together like old bones cast into the pit and cause repulsive melancholic echoes. One cannot argue with the catchiness or the dank air the album emanates; vocally there’s a truly arrogant smirk, as if the voice is at once chewing on a discarded limb and mocking the next potential victim. The chugging nature of the track means it scurries into the brain like a bacteria and quickly eats away at the membranes; again, there’s that mid-tempo drudgery for added fungal quality.

However, that dampness just keeps on crawling; the shorter but faster ‘Excarnation’ is a horrid ravenous frenzy of wild guitars and rampant drums, only matched by the equally brief and bruising ‘The Living Grave’ (which features a solo by Rotting Christ’s George Emmanuel). The same could also be said for the salivating horde that is ‘Necrolation’, which has all the subtlety of being eaten alive by giant rats as the solo scampers through the mire of hostile drum hammers and cool, chugging riffs.

Sandwiched somewhere between these hideous shorter blasts are the brilliant ‘Darkness Burns Forever’, a pivotal barrage that hints at scathing, colder black metal with its initial guitar sound and features a solo from ex-Carcass man Carlo Regadas; the track eventually unfolding as a mid-paced bone gnawer rife with melody and those harsh vocal burps. Throughout the track runs a sombre vein, hinting at old Paradise Lost with black metal leaning, particularly in that scathing vocal sneer.

Austerymn is not a band to rest on one particular style, however; the majesty comes with that killer solo complemented by a harmonious chug. The same can be said for ‘In Death… We Speak’; a catchy mid-tempo juggernaut featuring a solid drum nod before its damaging gallop takes control. The dehydrated vocal strain is one to savour throughout, but more so here. This dry strike becomes beefier with the gloomier march of ‘Buried Alive’, the toxic death-thrash of ‘Dead’ and the closing decomposition of ‘Riven’ with its fiendish guitar tone and jack-hammer drumming. In fact, on the whole, Sepulcrum Viventium offers so much variety within its obvious framework of nodding to the big guns that by the time it’s over, you’ll be quite used to that graven fume you’ve acquired.

Very much earthy by design, Austerymn’s debut is one I cannot recommend enough for fans of an era that we’ll never forget. It’s even more exciting to see a British band paying homage, but in the right manner and never once losing their own identity through the veil of sepulchral extremity.

Neil Arnold

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