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EKPYROSIS
Primordial Chaos Restored EP

Terror From Hell (2018)
Rating: 7.5/10

It was last year’s debut full-length offering Asphyxiating Devotion which turned me onto this unruly Italian death metal band, and so it was a nice surprise to see an EP come so quickly after.

Primordial Chaos Restored may only offer five tracks – one of which is a cover of Incantation’s ‘Devoured Death’ – but this is such a good, heavyweight death metal offering.

This four-piece dabble with cosmically tinged extreme metal where hideous doomy drudgery is the order of the day. Imagine an ashen void of fraying sinews and unnameable horrors whereby guitar chords groan and ache with galactic gloominess, the leads sombrely reaching out of the dismal trenches of horror to form pallid wisps of suffocating smog before the whole foggy murk is disrupted by brutal pace built upon raging, stormy blast-beats and guttural grimness.

The mix of pace and dismal slower splurges makes for engaging listening as the quartet coughs up Immolation-styled trudging that at times gives way to palatial melancholy, as with the gargantuan terrors of tracks such as ‘Instigation Of Entropy’ which also have a strong odour of Incantation, but it’s no pale mimic.

The riffs and booming percussion roll in ominous fashion as the bellowing vocals speak of unworldly nastiness. My personal favourite track ‘Conception From Nothingness’ comes hurtling like a freezing draught to the spinal cord, the bass and drums hammering with unrelenting brutality before a sudden jolt stops you in your tracks and a suffocating chunk of silted doom comes crawling, oozing and seeping with ominous slowness.

It’s catchy stuff in its mid-tempo state as we hear of “Promulgation of doom” and “Constrained singularity reboils yet tamed”. What such lyrical absurdities mean is beyond me, but one cannot help slip into the cold, dragging abyss that Ekpyrosis create. Those icy black holes filter out yawning gapes of solid death and doom layers before the manky wickedness of instrumental ‘Chaos Condensing’ comes crawling and sprawling.

With the old school death metal revival still going strong, Ekpyrosis’ brand of mouldy, yet extra-terrestrial death metal is sure to stand the test of time. The Italian clan provide a perfect breeding ground for their marrying of familiar styles, whether it’s in the form of touching upon grim Swedish death metal strands, or Blood Congregation-styled structures tainted with putrid Autopsy-styled streaks of the macabre.

By piling so many layers and influences, Ekpyrosis have spewed up a set of accomplished and downright heavy songs for when the clouds turn grey and the sky cracks open to reveal celestial tentacles of horror.

Neil Arnold

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