DAILY RECORD : Obliteration

Posted by: Tony – Jul 09, 2010

Obliteration – Nekropsalms (Fysisk Format Records)
Once a genre of music has existed long enough to have a comfortable understanding of itself as a system of aesthetic parameters and preconceived notions, its practitioners often begin to cast their creative gaze backwards. The results vary – typically such artists produce banal rehashes of once-fresh ideas, soulless wallowing in retro nostalgia.

Occasionally, however, effective tribute can be paid to a genre’s earliest practitioners without being derivative or compromising their own creative vision.

To many ears, death metal as a genre has had little forward momentum creatively since its inception in the mid-80s. The vocals still growl, the tempos still blast, and the imagery is still mired in Z-grade slasher films, but the style has become more and more inclined towards a slick professionalism, with recordings often glossed over with such strong studio treatment that the much of the energy and aggression which served as stylistic cornerstones have been rendered toothless and mechanical. It wasn’t always this way – early death metal bands like Nihilist, Repulsion, and early Darkthrone tempered the increasing bombast of 1980s heavy metal with a punkish rawness and an almost total disregard for the whims of the mainstream.

This approach, increasingly rare with each passing year, has not been forgotten by Oslo, Norway’s Obliteration. Eschewing the trappings of both over-produced contemporary death metal bands and self-consciously retro tendencies, Obliteration trade in the style of death metal rarely heard outside of the era between 1985 and 1990. The band succeeds by looking back at the style’s origins rather than just copying from the genre’s more successful moments. For instance, while the influence of bands like Bolt Thrower or Possessed is readily apparent throughout Nekropsalms, Obliteration has an understanding of what influenced those bands. Songs like “Nekropsalms Evoke A Frozen Age” or “Catacombs of Horror” possess references to the menacing dirge of St. Vitus or Black Sabbath alongside more rock-oriented moments that wouldn’t be out of place on a Motorhead album.

Even when the band’s material leans towards standard death metal fare, it does so in a way that emphasizes well-constructed songwriting rather than gaudy technical virtuosity. The tempo, while typically fast, rarely relies on the hyperspeed blastbeats which have come to characterize the style, instead favoring trade-offs between sludgy dirge and punk-oriented drumming not far removed from Discharge or Varukers.

Lyrically, there is little variation from standard death metal tropes. It doesn’t take too close a look at titles like “Ingesting Death,” “Exterminate,” or “The Spawn Of A Dying Kind” to see that Obliteration is not reinventing anything within their style. Ideas of death, doom, desolation, and destruction have been at the core of heavy metal since its inception forty-odd years ago and the two will likely be inseparable as long as misery still pervades and amplifiers still go to eleven. Like the rest of the album, the lyrical approach is nothing new, but taken as part of a larger whole any shortcomings are easily overlooked.

There is little question that Obliteration’s music is targeted to a fairly limited audience. The majority of death metal fans, acclimated to years of triggered drums and solid state guitar amps, will likely find the music incomprehensibly raw, relying as it does on visceral down-tuned aggression rather than technical prowess. This album will, however, find a place in the blackened heart of any metal fan who appreciates the sort of band whose albums will never be found in Hot Topic, the sort of band whose paeans to the darkness were ignored by all but a handful of forward-thinking metalheads.