Labels: Sound Devastation
Review by: Alex Deller
Crawling on their belly toward the farthest outposts of doom and death metal, Ehnahre offer up an experience that’ll force any listeners staying the course to explore some dark nooks and crannies they may well wish they’d never gazed into. A lengthy five-part ordeal, “The Man Closing Up” sees the band dealing very much in textures and ambience, favouring glowering half-chords, brittle rakings of the strings and jarring, jazz inf(l)ected changes of direction over straight-up aggression, employing familiar minor-key descents into the abyss or roiling death metal lurches only on occasion, seemingly as a murderous afterthought rather than any sort of end purpose in themselves. Vocals shapeshift between monosyllabic death grunts, throat-clogged rasps and mysterious ether whispers, those behind them joined for a time by the morose croon of fringe metal journeyman Jonah Jenkins. The overall result finds itself pitched somewhere amidst the wilfully obtuse likes of Khanate, Asva and Portal; unpredictable and not necessarily easy to digest but, as of yet, ever so slightly shy of the greatness those bands have managed to achieve.