Review by Sandre the Giant
Irish deathgrind legends Abaddon Incarnate are back after an eight year wait since their blistering 2014 record ‘Pessimist’, and their new record ‘The Wretched Sermon’ will be out on Transcending Obscurity Records in August. It is touted to be a more complex and multilayered work compared with previous stuff, so I’m looking forward to how that is incorporated.
Opener ‘Rising of the Light’ is exactly what we’ve been waiting for; a bulldozing slab of savagery that is equal parts chainsawing Swedish death metal and grinding, bug-eyed fury. There’s a particular tone to these tracks that just eats its way into my brain and refuses to make space. It leaves me dribbling in anticipation of the spiralling carnage of ‘Gateways’, or the breakneck throat slitting rage of ‘Shrine of Flesh’, as the band just ensure that you haven’t forgotten about them and they are defiantly still here. But their work has definitely evolved over the years, and ‘The Wretched Sermon’ is obviously more nuanced and measured than previous work. The rumbling breakdowns of ‘Parasite’ are devastating, as is the barbaric and expertly constructed ‘Into the Maelstrom’ which feels much longer and more complex than you’d expect for a sub two minute track.
As the album progresses, the direct madness begins to change into more bloated and majestic exercises in death metal cataclysm, such as the fiery technical barrage of ‘Hyperchaos, or the grandiose morbid apocalypse that is ‘Isolation and Decay’, a vast work that incorporates a lot of the band’s expert violence but adds it into a almost soaring and adventurous score. Abaddon Incarnate’s work is a incredible evolution from caustic grindcore into venomous and layered death metal. ‘The Wretched Sermon’ sees the pinnacle of this power, as it is an album rich and powerful in tone but never forgetting those barbed wire, disease riddled grind origins. Vicious, brutal and magnificent.
https://www.facebook.com/abaddonincarnate
https://abaddonincarnate.bandcamp.com/
The Killchain 