On Cutting the Throat of God (Debemur Morti Productions) Auckland, New Zealand’s Death Metal three-piece Ulcerate continue to refine their musical representation of an exploding volcano raining down molten rock and laying waste to all below.
Ulcerate is not a band you casually put on in the background. Musically driven by the near-overwhelming bombardments of drummer Jamie Saint Merat and the scything guitar lines of Michael Hoggard, the band has been sharpening their aural-assault weaponry for almost twenty-five years. Their seventh album, Cutting the Throat of God is often anxiety-inducing in its remorseless landslide of percussive power, that swirls like a tornado of bricks.
There is more, however, to the album than (admittedly impressive) power and technicality, the sensitivity and skill in creating atmosphere is equally impressive.
Each of the album’s seven tracks clocks in between seven and (just shy of) ten minutes. Within that time you can be sure that you will be pummelled to within an inch of your life by those rapid-fire drum bombardments. It’s a lot. Part of what makes the album so interesting though, is that when these extended percussive assaults drop out an underlying musical framework emerges that’s more akin to alternative / doom/ Gothic Metal.
The music is in fact, for the most part, a gloomy, ominous mid-tempo march through mysterious, mythic, dark terrain.
Take opener “To Flow Through Ashen Hearts”. The track establishes a great, gloomy atmosphere with sparse, resonating guitars, a big bass texture and a drum rhythm that isn’t flashy, but still has little bursts of flair that tell you explosions are coming. There isn’t long to wait for those brick-smashing drum rolls, accompanied by bassist/vocalist Paul Kelland’s reverb-soaked death-metal growls to escalate, but with the mood and tone established what the band does so well here and through the rest of the album is hammer you into near submission before stepping back again and letting the atmospherics wash over you (before the next bombardment).
Lyrically, you probably won’t catch much of what Kelland is singing (growling) about, but a snippet from the first track gives a pretty good representation of what’s being laid out over this weighty music. “These wicked and tortured dreams Intertwined with the real. Until becoming the real. Absent in this illusion. Absent from this reality. Falling into the terror of this reflection”. It feels like something from an apocalyptic Greek or Roman tragedy of the gods (quite fitting given the music and indeed the title of the album).
“The Dawn is Hollow” builds on the established atmospherics with some beautiful harmonic passages (once you’ve survived the initial cacophony caving in your walls), while “Further Opening the Wounds” rewards the listener with an awesome, head-banging riff about six minutes in.
The high point of the whole album could be “Transfiguration In and Out of Worlds”, which mixes in some memorable, gothic guitar riffs and laconic drums rhythm with the now familiar bombardments. Even as the track escalates, there’s a lot to groove to and some twists and turns to the music that will take you by surprise, with drummer Merat showing off his versatility.
With the album driven by so much technical drum fury, there are many parts that could be highlighted, but the series of rolls that start to build in the final three minutes of “Undying as an Apparition” stand out as some of the most impressive of the more aggressive parts.
Cutting the Throat of God is not an easy listen, even for fans of Death Metal, but as well as being a powerful display of intense, technical power it’s an absorbing landscape of mythic deicide.
Buy the album here:
https://ulcerate.bandcamp.com/album/cutting-the-throat-of-god
8 / 10
TOM OSMAN