(Andy Synn hopes that his love for the new album from Barren Altar is in no way impermanent)
For those of you who still think my review slate recently – Cryptopsy, Deadguy, Heaven Shall Burn, etc – has been a little too “big time”, here’s something undeniably uglier and more underground courtesy of Black/Doom death-worshippers Barren Altar.
Clocking in at just under forty-four and a half minutes, split up into four suffocatingly dark and crushingly claustrophobic tracks – the shortest of which is still over eight minutes in length, the longest a soul-crushing fourteen minutes of creeping horror and keening melody – the band’s second album, Bound By Impermanence, marries savage explosions of brittle, blackened blastbeats and lashings of doomy, decaying groove with passages of sombre, subdued ambience and eruptions of seething, spite-fuelled fury.
Fans of similarly grim and grief-stricken bands like Crust, Mizmor, and the sadly-defunct Bereft, will likely find a lot to love here – although, truth be told, “love” might be the wrong word for an album as steeped in desolation and despair as this one – but that doesn’t mean that Barren Altar are a carbon copy of any of these other artists, merely that they’re mining a similarly deep vein of raw, gut-wrenching emotion and scalding, scorched-earth sonic degradation.
What’s particularly interesting, however (to my ears at least), is that while the visceral thrill of the scything guitars and grimy, grinding grooves which make up the dense, oppressive backbone of songs like oppressive opener “The Rust Plains” and even more cataclysmic closer “No Exit” is undeniable, some of the quietest moments – such as those which punctuate the massive “A Landfill of Molted Flesh” – hit just as hard in their own way, allowing (if not forcing) the listener to dwell on their misery and contend with their own mortality in musical form.
And, ultimately, it’s the contrast between (and juxtaposition of) these two extremes – the distorted ugliness of “Sulfurous Exhalations”, for example, at one point completely collapsing under its own weight into a shimmering singularity of ambient emptiness – which makes Bound By Impermanence hit just as hard emotionally and spiritually as it does sonically.