PHRENELITH
Desolate Endscape
Me Saco Un Ojo / Dark Descent (2017)
Rating: 8/10
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Phrenelith may be a new name to some, and that’s no real surprise as this Danish combo has only been existence since 2013, forming out of Copenhagen and since then offering a trio of demos and one EP (Chimaerian Offspring), which also emerged this year. But it’s clear that these guys have been busy because hot on the heels of the EP comes this mightily impressive debut album.
The band have mastered the art of vomiting up a thick, dense wall of old school death metal straight from the summery haze of the early 90s. For people born yesterday and completely unaware of what death metal is, or folk who have only recently got into such a subject, then maybe I could point to bands such as New Jersey’s Disma for similar murky sounds. But either way, if you like your metal very heavy and very guttural then you will have to immerse yourself Desolate Endscape.
We get smothered by eight woundingly heavy compositions, beginning with the suffocating ‘Conquering Divinity’. The four-piece offer two tempos, the first being a slow, crippling trudge which heaves and rolls like some destructive oily tsunami, while at the other end of the spectral spectrum there’s a hammering pace based upon the foundation of Tuna’s astonishing percussion – a mighty barrier of cascading percussion that simply batters its opponent into submission.
That blending of pace and methodical pummelling is more so evident on the amazing ‘Deluge Of Ashes’, with the vocals acting as bellowing, throaty blood-clotted grunts. When the band picks up the pace they are very fast but always thick sounding, and yet the vocals always remain at the same, steady oozing pace – almost lackadaisical in comparison to the impenetrable noise behind it.
‘Crawling Shadows, Slithering Tongues’, in title alone, seems to sum up this cleverly constructed platter, as each track unravels like a bulky, muscular tapestry of horror protruding from which are lapping, flicking tongues representing those speedier segments.The title track has so many crafty shifts of tempo it’s as if some leviathan is shifting its body within its gloomy plateau while the vocals act as some sort of squelching, burping bodily emission of such unnatural origin.
Yet rarely do Phrenelith feel the need to bamboozle the listener – indeed, this is no jarring soundscape of mind-bending intricacy. Instead, we simply find ourselves webbed up in a sticky coat of chugging, chesty guitars, doomier chugs of suspense and then those spikes whereby the band goes full-throttle, as with ‘Dysmorphosis’ which provides once again those excellent tempo changes.
The epic, however, as in most cases with bands, is saved for the last wretched expression in the form of the seven-minute ‘Channeling A Seismic Eruption’. An initially slow, dragging chasm of heaving percussion and earthquake-causing bass yawns, the track builds more and more, getting heavier and heavier until becoming one enormous landslide whereby the vocals are merely a grizzled commentary to the heavy layers of silt, sweat, soil and slop before us. It feels extremely simple, with Phrenelith simply leaking onto us a substantial amount of clotted goo to the point where we become unable to move.
Desolate Landscape, in whatever form it takes, is a pea-soup fog of a record sure to bring on chesty coughs, crushed rib-cages and the puking of one’s own innards. To be taken twice daily.
Neil Arnold
