(written by Islander)
We’re about to spill a considerable volume of words about a single song of death metal that ends just shy of the four-minute mark, because it is such an explosive reminder that even the last month of the year is a bad time to sleep on new music.
The song is “Wandering Ashdream” and it’s from the forthcoming second album by the Japanese band Invictus which will be released next month by Memento Mori and Me Saco Un Ojo. As mentioned, it’s the kind of track that inspires a great flooding of words, but the album as a whole does the same thing, witness these portions of the labels’ press statement about the record:
Conceived in Nagano City back in 2015, INVICTUS‘ original goal was to play death metal with hints of technicality and a strong thrash metal edge, combining the morbid grooves and abhorrent atmospherics of all archaic death metal gods….
While the target remains the same, the band is now exploring a broader spectrum of riff-oriented death metal in order to aggravate the carnage, exuding a more pernicious aural decay and bludgeoning the listener into submission by some of the meatiest and most vitriolic death metal conceivable….
Guttural guitars throw forth bolts of arcane malignancy while the drumming pulverizes the corporeal body with percussive blows. Vocally, the band sit in their macabre low-register and ensure everything is tied together gloriously for your listening displeasure with a truly crushing production that’s as organically lethal as it can get.
You see what we mean? Now, onward to our own linguistic spillage:
Almost everything about “Wandering Ashdream” is monstrously grand, or grandiosely monstrous — foul but supremely commanding — and the parts that aren’t brazen are instead maniacal.
Deploying a filthy, fuzz-bombed guitar tone, Invictus open with an insidiously squirming riff punctuated by enormous detonations and pulverizing cannonades, and then magnify the malicious imperiousness of those sensations, causing the music to blare and obliterate.
Even when the band then slow the onslaught and convert the music into a gruesome, lurching and hulking beast, it still displays a kind of horrid grandeur (the roaring and baying gutturals are equally horrid). And then comes the mania! The guitars feverishly skitter, maliciously churn, and spiral into mad and miserable fretwork convulsions.
The music is so filthy and voracious in its changing aspects that the guitar solo, when it arrives, is something of a surprise — clean-toned and swirling, fleet-fingered and fluid, exotic and a bit psychedelic. It’s delicious icing on a very horrific cake. And at the end, we get another adrenaline-fueling dose of monstrous grandiosity.
Special mention must be made about the drumming. It’s a non-stop spectacle of immaculately timed, beautifully executed electrification of listeners, sometimes thunderous or brutish but mostly fast and dextrous, and often a sharply tuned and exhilarating counterpoint to the rampaging and hulking monstrosity of the riffing.
The name of the album is Nocturnal Visions, and it’s set for release on January 26th. Memento Mori will handle the CD version, while Me Saco Un Ojo will handle the vinyl version — both of which are adored by the artwork of the great Juanjo Castellano.
Check the links below for more info, and also get mauled, masticated, and mortified by the album’s first advance track, “Abyssal Earth Eradicates“.
MEMENTO MORI (CD):
https://www.memento-mori.es/
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label
https://www.instagram.com/memento.mori.label
ME SACO UN OJO (LP):
https://www.facebook.com/mesacounojo
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com
INVICTUS:
https://www.facebook.com/InvictusDeathMetal
https://invictus3.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/invictus_death_metal