AN NCS PREMIERE: ORDEALS — “SUFFER CURSED ORDEALS”

(written by Islander)

Six years after their last EP (Choose Death, enthusiastically reviewed here by our Andy Synn), the New York black/death trio Ordeals are returning with their debut album, which has the hard-to-forget name Third Rail Prayer. It will be released on September 26th by Eternal Death.

Much like the kind of mental imagery conjured by the album title, Ordeal‘s new music is convulsive, but its electrified (and electrifying) spasms shake and twist in often unpredictable directions, providing a collage of dread, damnation, delirium, and doom that’s disturbingly distinctive.

Consider, for example, the album’s opening song and title track, which surfaced last month. To repeat some words we disgorged back then, it sounds like emergency sirens going off in the opening seconds, the only warning you get before the song explodes in an assault of blasting drums, incendiary guitar-storms (it still sounds like sirens are going off within them), and crazed screams. The riffing is engulfing but feverish; the bass thunderous; the lead guitar a fiery and frenetic presence; the voice unhinged as it cries out.

That voice maniacally laughs too, and the guitars ring out peals of pain above big detonating beats and earth-heaving low frequencies. The lead guitar pierces through and wrenchingly wails, a prelude to a spiraling splendor of sound, which is itself a prelude to a final jaw-dropping, heart-pounding convulsion of violent intensity. Listening to it might well make you think you’ve grabbed a third rail.

Now you’ll get a second taste of what the new album presents, through our premiere of the song “Suffer Cursed Ordeals“. Like the title song, this one twists and turns too.

Once again Ordeals instantly reach out and send a jolt of electricity straight to the brain stem, deploying a piercing lead riff that maniacally writhes above thunderous low-end tumult, and then the twists start coming in rapid succession.

The beats thump and stomp while the broiling guitars set skies on fire. The drums blast away, and those fires expand in great swaths. A lead guitar wails in agony as voices cry out with supercharged intensity, and the riffing descends into moans of pain.

Across a bridge that’s both grand and fearsome, the music takes off in a hammering gallop, with voices screaming and the guitars heating up with exhilarating, thrash-fueled fevers and even more rabid convulsions of broiling madness.

And Ordeals still have more twists in turn in store for you, introducing enormous booming drums and a swaying-cobra lead-guitar melody that sounds both exotic and increasingly poisonous — and then an eruption of volcanic violence.

It bears repeating that the vocals of Zealous Hellspell (a fitting name) are stunning, so unrestrained and shattering they sound like a person possessed. It also bears repeating that Ordeal‘s intertwining of death, black, and doom metal creates breathtaking results, in part because the changing phases integrate so well.

Eternal Death will release Third Rail Prayer on CD and vinyl LP formats. For pre-orders and more info, check the links below.

To coincide with this long-awaited album’s arrival, Ordeals will be playing the Covenant festival in Vancouver, BC the weekend of release (Sept. 25-27). For more info about that fest, go here.

PRE-ORDER:
https://eternaldeath.bandcamp.com/album/third-rail-prayer

ORDEALS:
https://www.facebook.com/OrdealsAscendant
https://ordealsascendant.bandcamp.com