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WITCH KING
Voice Of The Ossuary

Blood Harvest (2018)
Rating: 7/10

Rhode Island reprobates Witch King have been rattling around the American underground since 2008, so much so that it’s taken all this time to release a debut full-length outing. But I’m actually thankful this gang has only released one album because such is the violence and force of this record that I’m gonna need one hell of a time out afterwards.

This is bestial Hell metal that really hurts the ears, eyes, nose, throat and genitals – the band causing chaos and fiery menace as they bark, belch and billow in untimely manner, with the only respite coming from the occasional silences between each of the ten songs offered.

We’ve got a drummer who is slapping for Satan, a guitarist hitting a trash can with his axe, and a bass player no doubt plucking and strumming with bloody stumps, while the vocals are straight from the land of Satan’s pie-eating contest – blasphemous burps which just add extra crude coating to what is essentially a barrage of ill extreme metal.

Hard to believe then that this cacophony is created by just three guys, and I’m sure their parents would be very proud of such a mess – just try and take in the belligerent drum display of Ben Lopez and you might be half the way into enjoying a harsh stint in Hell. This is unrelenting noise from another of Hell’s rarely caressed corners; super charged, clanking, grinding, pulverising thrash-death-black-war metal whereby track titles should hardly matter in the greater scheme of things.

Damn, I made it to second hell-hammer ‘Void Emissary’ and just wanted to die, my skulls a sorry, mushy mess battered to a pulp by those horrible drums, while Sean McQuade’s guitar sound is just a screeching, clanking wall of dominating primal forces, and all this content without the garbled vocal and bass clanks is hard enough. Witch King is just one big violent and nasty hot-bed of blasting, forceful satanic junk; a blubbery blackgrind tumult that once, thousands of years ago, fed off the scraps of the likes of Blasphemy before being vomited up into some sludge-clogged pit of its own and then to eventually malform as this fucking pulverising entity.

I don’t really know what else to say; only noises of me shouting and then putting my head into a furnace of shrapnel, shit and blood will surely give you an idea of the noise manifested here. I guess I could just make some words up to attempt to describe this riff-gorged tirade of disgust, or I could maybe mention the hammering levels of intensity of tracks such as the title track or ‘Apocalypse Tribe’, but this is acquired taste stuff – hard for me to believe that even with all the years of metal behind me that there’s some war kids out there hell-bent on suffering to such an outburst. Just don your helmets because this is one black behemoth that’ll have you choking on the fumes.

Neil Arnold

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