The bizarre Italian black/death metal band Unctoris have been quiet for eight years, for it was in 2013 that they released their last music, a split that culminated a series of demos and EPs which began in 2005. Those of us who were unaware of their mad and mutilating experiments might therefore be forgiven for our ignorance. But at last Unctoris have revived, or perhaps finally escaped from whatever asylum confined and attempted to treat them.
They completed work on their debut album Shout Demise, which seized the attention of Iron Bonehead Productions, who will release it on November 19th. What we have for you today is evidence that whatever asylum treatments they received were utter failures. If anything, Unctoris have been reveling in their loss of sanity in even more weird, wild, and wondrous ways.
Witness “Cercherò Il Passaggio Di Ritorno O Sarò Cancellato“, a song that in its diabolical ingenuity will shake your sanity like a rag doll but paradoxically becomes mesmerizing.
The song really is an utterly diabolical and completely twisted experience. Without warning it blasts the listener’s head with a roiling blizzard of maniacal guitars, which then becomes a skittering, jittery sensation, and then an attacking hornet-swarm of sound, and then a macabre cavalcade of grandiose blaring bursts.
Those sensations are mind-piercing, brain-scrambling, and skull-scouring. Beneath them the drumming and the prominent bass notes cavort in wildly unpredictable fashion — scampering, stumbling, bounding, pounding, throbbing, and blasting. The music slows, speeds up, stops, starts again, squirms, convulses in violent spasms, seethes, seems to wander like a madman lost in his own dementia, and flails with vicious intent.
Meanwhile, the vocals are every bit as mad as the music is, expelling the words in barbaric howls, crazed screams, strangled regurgitations, monstrous growls, and eerie wails.
It’s the kind of track that makes me wonder, How did they do this? How did they even think about doing this?
In part because it’s so difficult for me to wrestle the music to the ground with words, I can’t resist sharing another person’s attempt to do the same (from the press materials crafted by Iron Bonehead‘s publicist):
“Much like the record’s quizzical title itself, UNCTORIS‘ multi-tentacled attack here makes total sense because it makes NO SENSE by systematically destroying those senses with brittle and bitter shards of the crudest black metal and most ancient death metal and even undigested doom.
“It’s simultaneously tension-inducing and massively mesmerizing, as endless catacombs of sound are explored and then defiled with devilish intent. Naturally, domestic legends like Mortuary Drape and even Death SS are touchstones, but more so are the cult likes of Morbid Upheaval and Goatfire. We can also mention the mind-mangling likes of Canada’s Lust, early Lugubrum, and current labelmates MALGÖTH and TYRANNIC – but really, Shout Demise is wholly its own insane experience”.
We also invite you to listen to the previously released track “Come Stabilire Se Ci Sei Ancora” — which is every bit as insane and unpredictable as the track we’re premiering today. If our premiere didn’t leave you simultaneously mesmerized and clinging to the shredded remnants of your sanity, this one will finish the job. For more info about the album, check the links below.
IRON BONEHEAD:
http://www.ironbonehead.de
http://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions
UNCTORIS:
http://www.facebook.com/unctoris