(written by Islander)
If we had had our head screwed on straight and allowed a few minutes of calm thought instead of chasing after passing cars, we would have sent Fermento a few interview questions to accompany preparation for this premiere. Or at least one question: “What in the world caused you to make such a significant shift in sound on your new album?”
That question is the elephant in the room. Fermento made some big marks in the pages of Spanish (and even global) metal history, as perhaps the first death metal band in Spain when they formed in 1991, and as among the brick-layers over the next decade-plus in the building of the hostile edifice known as brutal death metal, with their 1997 debut album Symbols of Decrepitude, Symbols of Supremacy as a keystone.
Signs of restlessness became evident in their 2004 sophomore album Insignia, which followed the band’s move from Madrid to Ourense in Galicia and was far away from straight-forward brutal death metal, and in 2009’s Recipe for Cremation. But for as much evolution and experimentation as those albums revealed, they were still rooted in traditions of death metal.
Something clearly happened in the roughly 14 years that have elapsed since that third album and the new one, Acts of Blood, because, by the band’s own admission, it represents “a bold evolution in their musical direction.”
It might go too far to claim that Fermento completely mutated into a black metal band over the long stretch of years since their last studio album, but the new full-length has definitely brought elements of black metal prominently into the Fermento fold. Acts of Blood even includes appearances by two French guests from the black realms, BST (Order of Apollyon, Sotherion, VI) on drums and production and MkM (Antaeus, Aosoth, Destruction Ritual) providing guest vocals.
As one sign of just how far Fermento have broken away from their previous works, today we’re premiering a song from the new album named “The Stench Spreading To Your Progeny.”
Without prelude, the music furiously expands like a megaton blast front, with drums maniacally hammering, dense swaths of caustic and equally maniacal riffage assaulting listeners, and thoroughly scalding screams enhancing the music’s viciously lacerating impact, all of it undergirded by immensely heavy turbulence in the bass lines.
The crazed savagery of that opening attack is breathtaking, but Fermento also twist the song in other unforeseeable directions. The music malignantly and dismally clangs and poisonously swirls; monstrously distorted spoken words emerge; a new riff freakishly squirms and blares; and as the drums open up in a new attack, the fretwork finds new ways of expressing dissonance and dementia.
And so the song becomes mind-bending as Fermento relentlessly shift the riffs, the drum patterns, and even the humongous low-end permutations, though without ever backing away from the vocals’ shrieking hostility or the unbridled fury at the song’s core.
That song is the second to be publicly revealed from Fermento‘s new album. The first one, “Taste Emptiness“, solidifies black metal’s claim on Fermento‘s hearts, but it also demonstrates even more vividly the fiendishly twisting and turning nature of the band’s songwriting proclivities.
At 8 1/2 minutes, “Taste Emptiness” is nearly twice as long as the song we’ve just premiered, and Fermento use the space in a multitude of evil ways. By turns it’s eerily desolate and haunting, ruthlessly assaulting, maliciously haughty, and poisonously seething.
At times the music also seems to pulse like a warped siren, with abyssal spoken words appearing again in place of maddened screams and malignant snarls. At other times it convulses in eye-popping paroxysms of mad violence or weaves about like some hulking menace from another dimension.
Both the drumwork and the bass-work are again big attention-grabbers, both when they’re going flat-out and when the pacing slows, as the snare rhythmically snaps its jaws and the bass emits enormous groaning pulses.
“Taste Emptiness” might leave your own jaws gaping by the time it ends.
Acts of Blood is set for release on July 28th, adorned by macabre cover artwork created by Álvaro Argeles (former drummer of Fermento), and it’s available for pre-order now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://fermento.bandcamp.com/album/acts-of-blood-2
FOLLOW FERMENTO:
https://www.facebook.com/fermentoband
