RSS Feed


INFERION
This Will Decay

Horror Pain Gore Death Productions (2014)
Rating: 7/10

Having formed back in the mid-1990s, it should come as no surprise that Florida’s Inferion are still puking out abrasive lumps of jabbing black metal. The band was formed by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Nick Reyes who in 2003 was joined by Frank Gross, who provides the bass. Reyes was once responsible for all other instruments – although the band has seen several line-up changes over the years – but now the chief sorcerer is joined by drummer Carlos Delgado, and two guest lead guitarists in Jason Gato and Jose Bitar.

This Will Decay is the third studio album from Inferion who haven’t been that prolific in this sense, although have kept busy over the last few years by spitting out a few EPs.

This latest release is a rather no frills black metal affair that occasionally hints at thrashing death metal too. Mostly speedy, it’s the sort of album which rattles by but rarely grabs you by the balls in spite of some of the guttural vocal injections and harder raps of percussion, which enable tracks such as ‘Carrion For The Scavengers’ to writhe in a more beneficial manner.

To be honest, I’d much prefer Inferion as a more deathlier prospect, because although this is still very much a pacey black metal record it would certainly flourish with more variety, and for every ‘Carrion For The Scavengers’ there tends to be something less subtle or blunter; for instance, the rampant ‘Contempt’ with its hateful vocal nuances.

Even so, there is a nice dose of melody on ‘Directionless’ even if it’s quick to resort to standard black metal fare, but with the excellent production the complexity of the guitar is allowed to shine, and it is this instrument which takes the album to new levels, allowing it to escape from potential mediocrity.

With a lot of blackened death metal and deathly black metal – or whatever you want to call these subgenres – there is a tendency for a lot of the bands to sound alike, but Inferion, when it puts its mind to it, can be quite a formidable beast melting traditional metal values with abrasive touches.

‘Until The Sun Consumes Us’ is a perfect example of that marrying of stark melody and straightforward acts of belligerence, while ‘Further From The Light’ mixes a doom-laden quality with those frothing, faster sequences. It’s no wonder that fans of Behemoth and the likes have a fetish for Inferion, such is the epic and arrogant nature of some of the tracks, but in spite of the icy precision of, say, ‘Lament’, Inferion does have a tendency to wallow in the generic every now and then; the result being that some of the tracks can simply melt into one another, probably due to those speedier divisions which we’ve come to expect from so many of the bands within this genre.

However, this is still a quality opus where the positive heavily outweigh the negatives, and so if you like a deadly mix of blast-beats, striking guitar leads and above all a really monstrous sense of arrogance and mocking then This Will Decay should please all those who flock to the temple of blackened death metal.

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share