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BURIAL INVOCATION
Abiogenesis

Me Saco Un Ojo / Dark Descent (2018)
Rating: 9/10

Finally this Turkish death metal band gets round to releasing their debut album Abiogenesis, which comes eight years after Burial Invocation’s Rituals Of The Grotesque EP in 2010. Okay, I know that they split up in 2012 and reformed two years later, so I’ll give them a break because Abiogenesis is a very good opus.

The album features original members Mustafa Yıldız (vocals), Cihan Akün (guitar and bass) and Aberrant (drums). However, Yıldız has since departed having relocated to Germany. Cihan Akün has now taken over lead vocal duties, with Can Yakay Darbaz (guitar) and Ozan Yıldırım (bass) completing the band’s current line-up, although neither Darbaz or Yildirim appear on this record.

Abiogenesis only features five songs but four are fairly lengthy, including opener ‘Revival’. This is a sturdy ten-minute epic which begins in such brooding fashion, hinting at black metal aesthetics with those glacial guitars, and as the pace quickens the black metal feel continues until suddenly we’re swamped by such a fetid chug that I almost never saw it coming.

Heavy drops of shit cascade like manure dropped from a plane, with only the wailing solo managing to escape the weight as those encompassing vocal bellows emerge. Only a few minutes in and I’m loving this stampede of brutality; Burial Invocation mixing chunky fists of wholesome mid-tempo goodness with flourishes of technical speed.

The press release describes the sound of Burial Invocation as subhuman death metal, and I’d agree because I felt exactly like one after being flattened by the gruelling bass grumbles and grisly hammers of percussion. I did wonder what the band would fill their ten minutes of time with and ‘Revival’ is certainly the answer; a barrage of infectious yet booming death metal riddled with complexity, but also simplicity as it lumbers in doom-laden fashion.

Kudos throughout to the fine guitar work, the leads providing some sort of ascension to an unearthly plateau if only for us to evade those stamping riffs, the juggernauts of injustice which rain down without mercy.

The title track is 12-minutes of bone-breaking brilliance, where simmering segments of slower dread infiltrate the ears before an orgy of speed bewilders as ‘Abiogenesis’ breaks into unrelenting fragments of controlled chaos. Flashes of Dead Congregation filter through on more than one occasion, but that’s no insult as Burial Invocation continues to ply its trade by wielding monstrous slabs of brutality.

The mid-section of the title track offers up some devastating mid-tempo madness; chugging intensity thunders down flattening everything, reducing us to pulp before the intricacy kicks in again and then that gallop.

‘Phantasmagoric Transcendence’ begins in grandiose fashion, the dark brooding melody of the aching guitar work and the booming drum pedals just jab so hard. This one begins in almost doomy fashion before it proceeds to bake us in its blistering rays and we’re back under that toxic, heavy waterfall of wildly constructed leads and utterly brutal pace.

Fuck knows how the guys would remember such contortions and spasmodic portions live? The track just remains a stinging barricade of heaviness, all the while the leads remain playful yet not jazzy or befuddling. And the same goes for the rest of the structures; the thick landscape of sound remains in touch at all times in spite of the numerous shifts and changes. In fact, relief only comes on the two-minute acoustic outro ‘Tenebrous Horizons’, which allows us to breathe and wonder if we’re too fragile to play the album again.

Whatever your thoughts are on death metal as a genre, there’s no questioning the brutality, weight and rhythmic technicality of this massive sounding record.

Neil Arnold

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