Ulcerate
The Destroyers Of All

Talking about evolution within the confines of a pragmatic genre designed - with a purely mathematical approach - for sonic violence like death metal is no easy feat. Death metal was invented and developed by a small handful of bands in a few years between the eighties and nineties, and then it became just bread for the die-hard fans of the genre or boredom for everyone else.

Although I haven't followed the death-metal universe with particular interest for some time, it doesn't seem to me that there have been particularly enlightening proposals during the 2000s, years that have seen, in the broader context of extreme metal, the concept of evolution unfold elsewhere. The New Zealanders Ulcerate can in this regard be seen as a happy exception, although in their case talking about death metal is quite limiting: but above all, why discuss boring things in the face of the magnificence of an album like "The Destroyers of All"?

Arriving at the third chapter of their brilliant career, after an exceptional album like "Everything is Fire," the band delivers to print, in the first moments of this 2011 which is now drawing to a close, a work that marks another notch in their measured evolutionary path aimed at exploring a brutal sound that does not want to give up being a metaphor and cynical observation of the world around us. Their message remains pessimistic, the title of their latest album refers to us humans and our destructive attitude towards our planet: an apocalyptic picture that stages a desperate (yes, we're speaking the language of despair here) j'accuse against the entire humanity inexorably heading towards a senseless collective suicide. But beyond the tackled themes (all in all not particularly original), what matters is that Ulcerate's death metal is as beautiful as can happen to our ears craving annihilating yet fresh sounds: a death metal that does not forgo sludge and post-hardcore digressions and that starts from significant premises such as the evolved grind of Napalm Death from "Enemy of the Music Business" onwards, the high technical level death metal of Nile (authors of what perhaps we could until yesterday consider the last great stroke struck by the entire genre which is "In Their Darkened Shrines"), and the post-apocalyptic, morbidly psychedelic atmospheres of a work like "Through Silver in Blood" by the essential Neurosis (obviously stripped of the more mechanical and electronic attire).

Always talking about death metal, after all, and the lesson of various fathers of brutal (Incantation, Immolation, Suffocation etc.) is still evident, particularly with Paul Kelland's deep and viscous growl (a lot of cream in his mouth, a whole fire extinguisher's worth of cream shot into his mouth), which certainly doesn't leave much room for variation, but that ends up being the perfect complement to music whose attractions lie in the ruthless technicality with which the sonic massacre is perpetrated. And at this point, it's impossible to remain silent about the earthshaking/never-tiring drumming of Jamie Saint Merat, who for charisma, dynamism, and (let's say it!) real progressive sensitivity comes close to illustrious names such as Brann Dailor (Today is the Day, Mastodon) and Tony Laureano (Nile). His performance behind the drums is incredible, and it's precisely behind his restless and nervous hammering, his explosive rolls, his breaks at a furious pace, that a reasoned, ever-altering journey unfolds, becoming the careful autopsy of a musical style, death metal, from which it simply started to develop fully in an album that contains only seven tracks for over fifty minutes that certainly do not present unnecessary prolixity. And that says it all.

It is clear then that the discourse progresses beyond, projecting towards a claustrophobic yet majestic music that transcends the mere physical impact (which is not lacking, believe me!) and generates images of a desolation that is closer to the tutelary deities of the old school of industrial metal, Godflesh first and foremost. And from this point of view, we must undoubtedly thank the distressing harmonies generated by the dissonant and relentless guitar work of Michael Hoggard, whose creativity proves to be laden with a lacerating existential humus that perhaps is the least death metal aspect of the package.

The guitars in the first thirty evocative seconds of the opener "Burning Skies" recall the cosmic squeal of the strings in "Irrlicht" (Klaus Schulze), but it's only a momentary illusion, the calm before the storm, because from the drum attack on, the listener will be overwhelmed for the next fifty minutes in a whirlpool abyss of surgical riffs and dissonant melodies (see the second track, "Dead Oceans"), all shot at the speed of light with a mastery that is characteristic only of the Greats. But there will also be no shortage (and here I shoot big) of panic-inducing sound pastiches à la "The Silent Enigma" (Anathema), though always minced by Saint Merat's all-smashing double bass pedal (him again, always him), almost describing a disjointed emotional matter, devoid of romanticism, swept away by grind fury (and in this, the second half of the third track "Cold Becoming" is eloquent). The whole thing is set in extremely complex structures that know how to deftly balance imposing walls of sound and impetuous crescendos: perhaps everything starts from minimal phrases of arpeggiated guitar, capable of evolving, with a typical Neurosian method, towards the erection of sonic monuments of colossal scenic vastness (the incipit of "Beneath"), or everything more simply collapses into the roar of neurotic barrages where compressed guitars and cavernous voices crumble into an abyss of filthy distortions (the dramatic final portion of "The Hollow Idols," the most driven episode of the batch, or the apocalyptic advance of a "Omnes," the most meditated and melodically dark track), but the essence is that here it's pounding hard from beginning to end, although the entire work is traversed by an obsessive poetry of no-hope where the tension remains high at all times, and if there are rhythmic decelerations (emphasized by lacerating guitar feedbacks, distorted arpeggios, the guitar's scream that multiplies in an atrocious end-of-the-world chorus), they are only the prelude to new starts that maintain melodic ecstasy only to heighten its dramatic emphasis.

As often happens in these cases, individual episodes matter little, and the whole is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, where the band intends to detail in order to create a comprehensive picture where sensations and the global atmosphere conveying the message behind the concept prevail: a furious struggle between man and planet, the irreconcilability between the two natures, the sense of destruction that arises from their clash. But it would be unfair not to mention the ten epic (yes, I said epic!) minutes of the title track placed at the conclusion of it all, where in the incredible final coda we also find echoes of that post-rock which seems to be the essential language to articulate the new verb of the Extreme: a journey that becomes a process of sonic deconstruction, progressive reduction/subtraction of elements, a painful operation aimed at lucidly instilling those denotations that describe the crumbling, pillar after pillar, of the entire architecture.

Monumental.