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MORBID EVILS
In Hate With The Burning World

Svart (2015)
Rating: 8.5/10

Morbid Evils is a new Finnish band formed in early 2014 by Rotten Sound frontman Keijo Niinimaa and, in spite of the dodgy name (I’m just not comfortable with the pairing of words), this is one helluva heavy debut record.

According to Niinimaa, “We have a desolate worldview, and our aim is to create soundscapes that suck the listener into fiery sewers in which there is no hope for a future”. And with such positivity lacking, I tread with trepidation into the murky world of this crushing opus.

In Hate With The Burning World is one of the most negative, rust-ridden, heavyweight slabs of grinding sludge I’ve ever heard. Having as much in common with churning industrial metal as it does with trudging, infected doom metal, Morbid Evils is one truly nasty bastard of a record that boasts six tracks which I guarantee will leave you dehydrated.

This is very much acquired taste misery born from the psyche of the unhinged members, who in this instance have constructed a batch of lumbering rhythms that are fronted by deep, gruff vocal barks and backed with a truly annihilating barrage of mechanised drum clanks and a grinding guitar and bass formation that just pummels the shit out of the listener.

Opener ‘Cruel’ is just a horrid example of musical destruction; it slogs at the same almost monotonous pace and yet becomes so bloody addictive that one cannot escape its intensity. With down-tuned riffs, woeful vocal snarls and rasps and just an overall feeling of depression and hate for humanity, Morbid Evils embarks on one of the most draining journeys known to man; imagine traipsing barefoot through mountains of rust, or clawing and clambering your way through a foggy landscape polluted by noxious germs and coated in a thickening ash, and you may have some idea of the anguish and negativity conjured here by this bunch of rather downbeat dudes.

There is no pace; just an overbearing crushing weight of instrumentation that just labours away and casts shards of grease and burning gas. ‘Crippled’ is just as bludgeoning as ‘Cruel’. It never strays from its pulverising path, but just when you think things can’t get any heavier or slower we are mashed up by the revolving blades of ‘In Hate’; a slow motion descent into the heart of desperation and industrialised death.

I don’t really know what else to say, except if you like a musical experience that is akin to drinking sewage then you just might fancy being beaten, battered and left for dead by this truly monstrous hate machine. It is simply a grinding soundtrack to a world obliterated, where human debris litters the smouldering streets and all that survives is some supernatural, grey force that revels in its own toxic drudgery.

Morbid Evils is just a horrible chugging sound that you need to be in the right mood for. After all, the turgid dirge that is ‘South Of Hell’ isn’t going to sit well under a blazing sun – unless of course you stay out long enough to let those blazing rays remove your skin and char your bones. Even so, if you’ve ever wondered what it is like to jump into the back of a garbage truck and be crushed and pounded by the churning machinery, then this vile manifestation probably comes close to the experience.

For those still with me, the album finishes with a brace of similarly sickening cuts; the gorgeous hatred of ‘Pollute’ and the joyous ‘Burning World’ – the latter being a ten-minute act of slow suffocation comprising of long, drawn out dissonance and deep, bellowing desolation.

In a world of political upheaval, war, murder and corruption, why not create a soundtrack to emphasise the utter negativity? Oh, Morbid Evils just have… and it fuckin’ hurts!

Neil Arnold

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