Genre : Black Metal Thrash Metal hybrid
Label : Candlelight Records
Origin : United States
Rating : 8.8 / 10
Buy it now
The Absu to date is a rabid black / thrash metal act that simply can't be arsed to spend seconds / minutes spouting at a random crimson moon with a corpse or two while riding on the same tremolo layers for wrist-slicing effect. Absu gives you that classic feel of unforgiving, Emperor Palpatine-grade black metal, but it mounts thrash metal rockets on all possible points you can think of along its body.
Opening track called Earth Ripper is a strong example of the elegant plan of the record : the fabric herein, though easily decipherable, remains relentlessly heavy BUT valiantly playful and alive, nevertheless. An elegant riff runs around left and right on top of good old intensified thrashing, and the madly rhythmized vocal / lyrical contribution of drummer / vocalist Proscriptor McGovern is a total fit for the extremely pissed off status report the song registers as. The LP has an occult theme to it, yet the structures - fortunately - show much more interest to reveal the Mad Mage in Intense Summoning-vibe in a larger than life, hilarious comic book fashion, and has no intent to wage a full scale war on your will to exist. If you want to hear occult black metal getting chased around with the big ass minigun of thrash for a change, then you need not to look further. You need to read on, oh!, useful infidel.
Abzu is composed of two main sections, and the common denominator of those is the old school, bravely and smartly varied reckless thrash metal, which though speaks the language of black metal. As for the two main sections, the first twenty minutes of the record is composed of five gritty, furious tracks with respective running times around 3:30 to 5:00, while the second part of the release is a monster-track nearing 15 minutes. It is a kind of deceit, though, and here is why : this second section, dominated by the monster-track, sounds to contain autonomous smaller tracks of similar character, only these have been embedded into one. So, don't expect an epic declaration of progression or something like that.
As hinted, the forms and general shapes of things and patterns you hear are black in character, but they are incoming along the structures and methodologies that are super-common to thrash. This inventive pairing is toppled by the tight, sanely balanced - regarding its frequency of occurrence - vocal presence. The vocals, while they are belonging to good old fashioned spouting at heart, pack legit, tight power, and it is notable that they are not faked in a GTFO fashion, like in metalcore.
Absu's Abzu sounds like the inner sonic outburst necessarily conceived by the panicked mind of a mad wizard who accidentally messed up his highly illegal demon summoning pentagram, and now he assesses his experiences for the fabric and related sake of All Unholy Remembrance, knowing that the demon he just invited will have the fat right to rip him to tiny pieces, and has zero doubt that it will do, too. Proscriptor McGovern addresses the highly mysterious, and none less vast perspectives and soul-swallower entities of Enochian Magick all over the LP, and his related lamentations find infinite ways to shoot out genuinely "heavy-sounding word pairs", so to speak, and this is the main idea herein. You don't necessarily need to look for direct meaning to the lyrics here, they can be understood through the mere moods of the words they sink into you as.
Absu's latest reveals a demon finger through the portal, and, once you are curious/reckless - or both - enough to move a step closer, the hand shoots out and pulls you through. 35 minutes is JUST the right amount of time you want to spend on that other side, which is another little something that makes this record a solid black-thrash delivery that has a sober understanding of its own grit and recklessness.
Rating : 8.8 / 10
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