RSS Feed


SUMMON
Parazv Il Zilittv

Iron Bonehead Productions (2018)
Rating: 8/10

Portuguese extreme metal is what’s on the menu today with the debut album from Lisbon-based Summon, a frightfully atmospheric and unstable trio who, with hoods raised high and chains at the ready embark on a journey to infiltrate the holy mind and reduce the brains to ash.

Boy, is this an album of hellfire and hate. Parazv Il Zilittv acts as one of the most bilious and cavernous noises I’ve heard this side of being in actual Hades for a Sunday stroll. Deep, rhythmic churning black chords give way to the devil’s minions clattering and hammering away on their anvils to create a sorry mess of seemingly chaotic and uncivilized mayhem that at times appears without any sort of human construction.

With the subtlety of a blast furnace, this bunch of ungodly demon preachers set forth upon terra firma by creating a gang of sonorous artefacts that go by names such as ‘Howling Graves’, ‘Cult Of Abomination’ and ‘Impetuous Sacrifice Of Thy Womb’; scarring, tortured blackened death cacophony whereby grinding, almost industrialised devastation is injected with distant, indecipherable vocal smears, smirks and hisses. Damn, it’s almost as if old Sauron is back on his throne and surveying the ashen landscapes of Mordor, barking fetid orders to his disciples.

Summon’s debut platter clatter takes no prisoners, the only saving grace being that it runs for only 40-minutes. But it will be the most arduous of experiences for anyone not already converted to such racket. The opening introduction ‘Whisper Of The Black Moon’ barely prepares us for the orgy of clamour that is ‘Howling Graves’; a momentous trudge through the black lands as the guitar, bass and drum join soiled hands before injecting us with a foul liquid of blackened speed, which produces a rushing force of illegible gales and where the “vocals” of N. merely act as some dissonant, incommunicable sizzle that seem to bounce of the walls and shatter the senses.

‘Cult Of Abomination’, complete with tolling bell intro, considers the same unearthly, inharmonious flow; an unmusical blast of wretched urgency where the instruments simply provide a thick, heated wall of bedlam. And that evil pandemonium continues throughout as ‘Shapes Of Darkness Transcending’ lowers the tempo to a mere dirty lumber before the guitar suddenly jolts us forward to the timely nods of J.’s hideous drum. It’s the slowest track on offer alongside ‘Below Death Splendour’, both thankfully providing respite in their hellish, slogging guise before the paralysing black metal strands of the title cut come oozing in on those deep, carving riff waves. Again, the vocals are just like an extra layer of instrumentation; black, liquefying sludge dripping from the backdrop of guitar, drum and bass before the scathing hiss of ‘Impetuos Sacrifice Of Thy Womb’ comes heaving out of the tomb like some nasty, satanic blizzard of tumult.

And all this before the eight-minute ‘In Odorem Mortis’ causes one hell of a mighty draught, excreting itself from the cracks of Hell’s walls as a mere distant echo of evil forces clamouring away in their labour before that brackish, blackened guitar slides into the room and the vocals slop comes cascading.

Producing suffocating scapes of doom, death and anguish is what Summon are about. Their moniker is rather apt in that this threesome so eagerly languishes within the dire, foul-smelling void it has constructed – a plateau so horrid and gruelling that only death, for the listener, can provide any sort of true escape or silence.

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share