(written by Islander)
In thinking about the music from Upon the Altar’s side of a 2022 split with DeathEpoch, we wrote that it left “no doubt that Upon the Altar’s mission is to devour all light.” The music was often toxic, suffocating, granite-heavy, vicious, and vocally horrifying. They allowed very little wholesome light to shine in their second album, Descendants of Evil, which followed that split. What did shine through was the band’s talent for creating hateful musical horror — a complex of vile, malicious, oppressive, desolate, and violently furious experiences.
Those of us who’ve enthusiastically fallen beneath the previous malign assaults of this Polish band will be thrilled to learn that on December 12th Godz Ov War Productions will release a new Upon the Altar EP, a six-track manifestation of pitch-black ruin named Profanation’s Vapor — and even more thrilled to hear it today through our full streaming premiere.
There is indeed something vaporous about the EP’s brief introductory track, whose distant rumbling and shimmering tones sound out of this world. The bestial demonic voices we can hear within that realm of fumes also make it a frightening experience — but the fearsomeness of the Intro track is dwarfed by what happens when the EP’s title song explodes.
And explode it does, in a maelstrom of brutally thunderous and maniacally propulsive drumming, enormous low-frequency turbulence, and a dense morass of scathing and roiling riffage. Maddened screams lacerate the listener, and huge percussive detonations shake the ground beneath. It is musical chaos unleashed by unbridled fanaticism.
The chaos does transform, thanks to humongous stomping beats and viciously slashing chords, and the music becomes nightmarishly hallucinatory as well — groaning and sizzling as demented voices speak. But the song also returns to chaos as the filthy and corrosive riffing swarms and sears, as the drums violently tumble, as the voices unchain their madness again.
In the following four songs Upon the Altar continue to entwine the often stupefying heaviness of death metal and the unhinged violence of black metal, and they shroud the music with sensations of blood-congealing darkness in differing shades.
At times it feels like we’ve been hurled into war zones, with drums firing like high-velocity cannonades, abrasive guitars screaming in convulsions of insanity, and the voices snarling and shrieking in outbursts of rage and pain. In those red zones of violence and power, the bass feels like an earthquake that may never stop.
Upon the Altar accent these episodes of horrifying destructiveness with vividly tumbling drum-fills, panoplies of crazed voices, dense and caustic layers of fleet-fingered fretwork, and horn-like bursts of almost-ecstasy — all of it calculated to overwhelm listeners and suck the wind from their lungs.
There’s really no marked relent in the music’s intensity as the EP goes on, but in those moments when the band ease up on the accelerator and reduce the violence of the churn, the music sounds toxically poisonous and oppressively abysmal rather than affording a time to breathe more easily (the closing segment of “Reign Awaits” is a prime example of that, and “Havoc Wreaked” includes its own episodes of hulking, groaning, and bone-smashing horror).
While the guitar tones are truly ruinous and suffocatingly dense, it’s still possible to detect the ways in which the two instruments vibrantly interact and change, even when they’re freakishly swarming, and the drumming also repeatedly proves to be variable despite the generally furious nature of the onslaughts. And thus, it becomes evident how much care has been devoted to the creation of these nightmares.
The closing song “Tenebrous Harbinger” differs from the others, and it’s also the longest by far. It has the pacing of a processional march, a procession in Hell, led by what sounds like wailing choral voices. It creates blood-freezing visions, which become even scarier when the drums start rumbling and the harsh vocals return. The lead guitar undergoes an exhilarating but also frightening seizure, but it too wails, and the bass sounds like it’s furiously chewing rock.
To be sure, the sound of “Tenebrous Harbinger” is still abusively corrosive but it’s the most doomed and desolate of all the songs, a mostly steady march into an abyss of degradation and hopelessness — and it includes a finale of organ melody that’s most haunting.
With all those thoughts behind us, we now turn you over to all the nightmares of Profanation’s Vapor, one of the most wholly devouring hybrids of black and death metal you’re likely to find this year (if you prefer a YouTube stream, you’ll find one after the links below):
UPON THE ALTAR is:
bTo • Guitars, Synth
Void • Bass, Vocals
Thisworld Outof • Drums
Profanation’s Vapor was recorded, mixed, and mastered at Roslyn Studio. The record includes drawings by Mar.A Artworks, which effectively capture the infernally horrific atmosphere of the music, and layout by WS Artworks. Godz Ov War will release it on December 12th, on CD and digital formats, with shirts. Pre-order now!
PRE-ORDER:
Physical: https://tinyurl.com/upon-the-altar
Digital: https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/profanations-vapor
UPON THE ALTAR:
https://www.facebook.com/uponthealtarofficial
https://uponthealtar.bandcamp.com