(written by Islander)
Unless you’re a medical professional or someone who’s been choked out you may not know that “anoxia” is a state of total oxygen deprivation within tissues or organs, an extreme form of “hypoxia” that can cause dizziness, disorientation, and permanent damage to the brain and other bodily organs.
You may have an idea why the Australian death metal band Anoxia chose that name if you heard their debut EP Languish in Suffering (the dizziness, the disorientation, the brain damage), though their music equally brings to mind the kind of organ damage caused by severe beatings.
But really, they were just getting warmed up, just beginning to explore their malevolent methods of inflicting punishment on listeners and audiences, methods that are now better perfected through their debut album Revel in Sin, as you’ll discover through today’s premiere stream in advance of the album’s April 17 co-release by Brilliant Emperor Records and Gutter Prince Cabal Records.
Anoxia do revel in sin on their first album, and they sound particularly defiant of the 6th Commandment because these 8 tracks are all killers.
The opening title song makes that plain as day. There’s a bit of sonic eeriness at the start, which makes what comes next even more monstrously pulverizing. What suddenly comes next are grisly, gargantuan chords that heave like some titanic beast while the drums crack like axes against solid oak. The sound is mangling and murderous, cold-hearted and abysmal, and capable of getting listeners’ bodies heaving too.
But even that sonic manifestation of horror is itself a prelude. The distorted stringed tones in the following song, “Blood On The Altar“, are every bit as heavy and filthy, but the ax chops faster and the riffage convulses in swarms of vicious derangement, like the feeding frenzies of hideous flesh-eaters.
Gruesome gutturals vomit the words, and the band also find room to fire up brutish audio piledrivers, so the flesh-eaters can get at the marrow within smashed bones. Rabid howls and a shrieking guitar solo add to the lethal madness of the tremolo’d fretwork swarms, and bunker-busting rhythmic blows and fast-jabbing riffage enhance the song’s fracturing impact. There might be some sore necks among listeners after finishing this one too.
The ensuing tracks reinforce the impression of Anoxia as purveyors of a particularly brutal and eviscerating brand of old school death metal. The songs conjure fantasies of some very heavy and extravagantly armored demolition machine festooned with ripping circle saws, immense piledrivers, and high-caliber guns, all working together to achieve maximum destruction.
The band also revel not just in sin but also in switching up their tempos and the textures of insanity in their riffing. There are phases in “M.N.W.“, for example, where the notes bounce about like the frolics of fiends, some of them hulking and others like fanged imps, and the soloing sounds not only demented but also tortured.
Moreover, the livid fretwork swarms in “Rule By Cold Steel” rapidly writhe and bend in sharp angles, bizarre as well as unhinged, and during “In the Wake of Desolation” the riff-work also frenetically stitches like mad machines sewing bodies together, or lurches like an equally ugly cousin of the opening track, whereas “Darker Forms of Knowledge” is just pure electrifying evil and “Merciless Sin” closes the album with sounds of pure misery.
Throughout all this the band keep dropping megaton bombs (often to announce a sudden gear-shift), rhythmically pounding with concrete-splitting force, and infiltrating shrill, freakish soloing. Throughout all this, the vocals continue roaring, gnashing, and exploding in blood-spraying screams.
Throughout all this, the snare drum keeps the mayhem and the madness on course, often the only steady thing within the music’s rapidly careening and clobbering movements. Throughout all this the music is produced in a way that delivers both ugly, pulverizing power, knife-sharp clarity, and distinct separation, creating horrid displays that are both crushing and surgical.
And so Anoxia prove themselves to be diabolically gifted, as interested in keeping listeners on their toes as they are in beating them senseless. Thoughts of Suffocation, Deicide, and Cryptopsy come to mind, and other antecedents may come to your mind. What should also come to your mind is an appreciation of just how very good Anoxia are in conceiving and executing the brand of death metal they’ve chosen to embrace. Listen now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://brilliantemperor.bandcamp.com/album/revel-in-sin
https://brilliantemperor.bigcartel.com/
https://anoxiadeath.bandcamp.com/album/revel-in-sin
https://www.gutterprincecabal.com/
ANOXIA:
https://www.facebook.com/AnoxiaDM
https://anoxiadeath.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/anoxia_death