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ABHORRENCE
Megalohydrothalassophobic EP

Svart (2018)
Rating: 8.5/10

Having reformed back in 2012, it gives me great pleasure to announce the comeback EP of Helsinki’s finest death metallers Abhorrence, but it’s still hard for me to believe that the guys never released a full-length outing.

Anyway though, Megalohydrothalassophobic (try saying that when you’re drunk…or sober) features four members of the same band line-up as 1990 (plus the addition of Paradise Lost drummer Waltteri Väyrynen), which is certainly promising and something that can’t be said about a lot of acts. Thankfully, the music is still great too, especially after the press release stated that the band was “still vulgar and still brutal”.

I just wish there was more than 23 minutes of music to chew on, but let’s just savour what we have for now. Abhorrence spews forth five tracks, the opener (‘The Mesh’) being a mere intro before the wrecking ball hits in the form of ‘Anthem For The Anthropocene’; a typically dark and almost psychedelic act of the sinister weighed down by its ominous introductory riff and blackened drum tolls.

It’s classic, old school sounding death metal, but with that typical Abhorrence streak of the unorthodox as Jukka Kolehmainen gives those pipes a blast. Such grim poetry is coughed forth as “What was blue, has turned green, What was green, has turned black, What was black, always comes back, And it haunts us from within”, which is simplistic yet brooding verse matched by that infectious drum clang of Waltteri Väyrynen.

The pace never quickens and Abhorrence maintain a level of soul-sucking heaviness that grooves and grinds hard, but the guitar work takes it to another level, bringing forth an almost cosmic and esoteric nature before the quintet lurches into the atmospheric trudge of ‘The Four Billion Year Dream’ – another brooding, menacing structure so monolithic as Jussi “Juice” Ahlroth’s bass plunder diligently to the doomy nods of Waltteri’s concrete stabs.

This is Abhorrence at their most effective and catchy; carving out great slabs of doom-ridden death metal before the sudden thrashing bursts lays everything present to waste as again we’re treated to more morosely psychedelic lyrics in the form of “Fierce the pale star burns, deep beneath the waves, Slow the planet turns, light shines from the graves”, while a Tony Iommi-style swirl adds to the already punishing cogs.

Some may argue that by this point that speed is not something on the mind of Abhorrence, but just be patient and prepare yourself for the haste of ‘Hyperobject Beneath The Waves’ which brings speed as well as groove based riffs – messrs Tomi Koivusaari and Kalle Mattsson working overtime to create varying tempos and atmospherics before another flurry of punishing dynamics wash over the listener like black waves of soot and silt.

Yep, Abhorrence is still vulgar and brutal. If you still, somehow, had doubts, then the best is left for last with the seven-minute atrocity ‘The End Has Already Happened’; an eerie psych-infused marrying of weird, cosmic suspense and eventual bludgeoning, the track building like vast blocks of alien design in some foetid, extra-terrestrial landscape. The guitars meander to generate huge catchy heaving monoliths of sound as Kolehmainen morosely growls “We are nothing and we know it, and there is nothing as beautiful, All these tears are washed away, by memories of carbon ghosts”.

Damn, it’s so wondrously poetic yet somehow offbeat, even though the Abhorrence sound is, for the most part, seemingly direct. Beneath those pitch black layers, however, exist staggering plateaus of unconventional dynamics which – when rounded off by those booming guitars and aching drums – result in one hell of a thick, blubbery noise, but one so well mechanized and intelligent so as to leave the listener feeling alienated to the true genius which inspired it all.

Megalohydrothalassophobic is a gargantuan death metal release that will have you scanning the skies or the waters of your local lake in search of esoteric nightmares.

Neil Arnold

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