NECROWRETCH
With Serpents Scourge
Century Media (2015)
Rating: 8.5/10
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Putrid Death Sorcery was the impressive 2013 debut opus from French band Necrowretch. For me, it was a classy slab of horrid black / death metal featuring some wondrously morbid vocal rasps and a general cavernous sound that grew on me with each listen like a deadly fungus.
In 2014 the band released an impressive EP entitled Even Death May Die, which in a sense was just a taste of what horrors to come with this wicked work. And so with With Serpents Scourge, we brace ourselves for another frightful experience into the realms of decay and dismal cacophony. Nine tracks, 35 minutes and a black slimy stain left on the carpet because once again this formidable trio has come up with the goods.
When I listen to death metal, I want to be dragged into some dank dungeon and literally aurally tortured by the sounds. I want the guitar sound to race and bludgeon and yet always remain damp and cold, and behind that noise I crave the percussive echoes of a drummer who has eight mutated arms and batters the skin like a serial killer pounding a skull. And next to this madman, I want to hear a bass that rumbles with formidable aplomb and backs a vocalist whose sneer sounds as if he’s spent the duration of his life chewing on rusty nails. And y’know what? Necrowretch ticks the box in every sadistic department.
Fast flurries of occult-tinged anguish, melodious excerpts of methodical cavernous horror and impure bursts of grimness are the order of the day here for a band that just keeps on going from strength to strength. Indeed, my first teaser for this affair was via the ungodly strains of ‘The Bells Of Evil Schism’; a black thrashing dose of scathing death metal featuring an abrasive guitar grate; a hammering drum and Vlad’s tortured yaps. Incorporating a ghoulish melody also helps too, and that comes to the fore here as the band initially starts out as a flailing echo of witchery before that nice injection of fusty slowness.
There are many of you of course who would have already heard ‘Even Death May Die’ too, which featured on that two-track teaser EP alongside a cool cover of Slayer’s ‘Black Magic’, but ‘Even Death May Die’ is a track I cannot get enough of. Wicked throughout, it features a vicious drum kick and that utterly putrid air caused by that drum, bass and vocal tangle which results in a speedy, satanic nastiness.
The opus also offers up more satanic majesty in the form of the furious opener ‘Black Death Communion’ which literally drips with Gothic gloom, but whereas previously I was keen to compare such labours of evil to Autopsy, this platter has a far spikier melodrama, marrying that expected morbid air with a truly spikey speed. ‘Feast Off Their Doom’ again showcases that combination of doom-laden atmospherics with typically fast death metal expression, while the title track offers up a dingy slice of classic death metal to some extent, hinting at classic Death but incorporating their own unique fustiness and hate.
Applaud must be aimed towards drummer Ilmar who on ‘By Evil And Beyond’ offers up a series of jazzy rolls, but for the most part the instrumentation is kept reasonably simple throughout – at times bordering on a classic Slayer-like impending dread in some of the opening riffs while always maintaining that snarling arrogance.
With Serpents Scourge is the natural next step for a band that is quickly becoming one of the most respected within their field, because while nodding to those old school values, Necrowretch is also kicking a majority of contemporary acts and glossy designs up their arse. This is a lethal concoction from a band hell-bent on causing ear destruction. Fast, hideous and sodden with gloom, With Serpents Scourge is one mean manifestation you do not want to mess with.
Neil Arnold
