Labels: SuperFi
Review by: Alex Deller
If their music is anything to go by, it would seem that Sermon are the type of people to stoically set themselves apart from humanity, living up in some distant mountain stronghold and rigorously honing their killing skills for some perceived day of reckoning. Blink and you’ll miss them coming right at you with their fifteen-second opening salvo, a blast of noise that somehow sounds like Neurosis engulfing Discordance Axis, marrying ferocious speed with some grand-sounding chords that give an epic quality to a song that vanishes before you know what the babbling fuck just happened. The rest of the record is a dizzying combination of grind, hardcore and metal, juggling the kind of discordant, snaggletoothed riffs that could’ve arisen from one of the last few Converge albums with the flat-out speed and brutality of a band like Nasum, all to the rasping screams of a horrified man being mummified by a giant spider.
Whether they’re grinding away like madmen, slowing their tricks down to a hunchbacked lope or fucking around with the kind of sadistically twisted riffs that could break necks a mile away, Sermon are doing it fucking well, throwing enough tricks and twists into their sound to keep you worrying about just what the hell is going to happen next, compelling you to spin the record again and again, even though each and every time is like apple-bobbing in a barrel full of razorblades…