Anus review 2003

Sammath - Verwoesting Devastation

After an impressive, Satyricon-fueled yet impassioned debut, this band have converted to a hybrid of black,death and speed metal which hopes to outlast the genres currently practiced as underground metal. The result in style is like a hybrid of Sinister, later Behemoth andnewer Emperor, emphasizing fast and precise riffs that boundary their development in motif clusters with abrupt pauses and deviant mutations. What is taken from speed metal is the constant throb of rhythm and the ability to hang on the strumming of a chord for extended periods of time, and from death metal comes a certain agility in riff tangent and reformation, while the black metal influence is a subtle melodic positioning underlying every riff that is brought to bear at a decisive moment in a revelatory phrase which unites and then divides the concepts presented so far. The result is a certain clarity of obscure emotional confusion in multiple directions arising from a fundamentally unresolved conflict of directions, which, when prompted by the developing narration of the song in riff and vocals, disintegrates in a flowering of complexity to a simple but non-evident conclusion, like a mystery novel occurring over the course of several centuries. Sometimes parts of this indulge extensively in harmonizing melody like the second Cenotaph album or early Rotting Christ, but this band intuitively know how to avoid overstressing it to the point of sickly sweet indulgence. While many of us who were impressed by the initial Sammath offering may find this change in style abrupt, a few listens reveals the wisdom of what is being done here: forging of an aesthetic that unites past metal styles into a newly balanced language. Inside of this style, passionate compositions of a more even-handed nature than the first abound, going beyond the sometimes boxy songwriting of the first with a larger ambition and scope of vision. For a band in this style, this is one of the acts that will endure past the next stylistic generation of metal.