RSS Feed


MARTYRVORE
Malevolent Desolation EP

Iron Bonehead (2014)
Rating: 8/10

It’s always nice to hear a record from a band you’ve never heard before, especially when it turns out to be very good. Martyrvore may have a rather awkward sounding name, but if you want to have your ears sliced and diced by a belligerent cacophony then look no further than this 12” mini-album; the band’s first new studio recordings in seven years.

Formed in New Hampshire back in 2002, Martyrvore is a brutal quintet consisting of members Reaper (vocals), Necrochrist (guitars / vocals), Terrorizer (guitars), Hellvomit (bass) and Gemini (drums). With names like that I was expecting a hellish lump of unmusicality, and I wasn’t disappointed.

These guys are dealers in underground, war-torn satanically blessed death / black metal; y’know, the sort of hateful, clanking, belching, rust-bucket of a sound some of us had been accustomed to back in the 1980s when South America was carving out such a hostile hole for such parasites to dwell within.

Unintelligible, manic vocal burps, a raging foetid sea of twisted riffs and pulsating percussion, and a bass simply used as an axe to flay its victims. With the equally recent Abysmal Lord (Storms Of Unholy Black Mass EP) providing similar classes in how to desecrate your local cemetery, Martyrvore have also joined this party of the damned.

Malevolent Desolation enable this barbaric bunch to run through a set of tracks which simply annihilate all in its wake in the form of ultra-fast, fog-drenched and thick-set hymns of the deranged, resulting in such unholy slop as ‘Masaya’, a track that comes complete with a blackened grindcore twist.

‘Global Annihilation’ must surely be the B-side if ever there was a re-release for Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal The World’. It’s a track that begins with the sounds of hellish war – bombs, machine guns, cries of agony – before resorting to a minute or so of stuffy, lo-fi aggression that eventually reduces itself to a pile of charred bones, such is its impure mayhem. That’s what this five-piece is all about; utter mayhem spewed forth from the unrepentant instruments of hell.

There’s a battering ram in the form of every track where the drums act as some chomping, chopping mechanical device set on eating up the ground and any human waste. With a strong lean towards the 80s and early 90s feel for obscure-sounding nightmares, this is surely another of those festering pits of noise you’ll be adding to your collection, especially if you’re a Bon Jovi fan!

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share