Labels: Doomentia – Iron Bonehead – Sentient Ruin – Sol y Nieve
Review by: Alex Deller
Been drawn back and back to this one. Not for the songwriting or class of it … though both are in evidence … but for the sheer violence of the thing. Honestly, there’s a real and worrying sense of attack running throughout ‘Nihl’ that’s borderline terrifying: a relentless, surging, breath-stealing quality that leaves most other so-called brutal music twitching gooily in the dust. The disjointed backbone of it is murky, mire-slicked death metal, but of an almost unidentifiable type that could feasibly be kin to either Portal or diSEMBOWELMENT. Elsewhere there are traces of grind, swathes of dissonance and something that’s hard to pinpoint but lends proceedings a cloying sense of doom and despair that helps make for a seriously compelling … albeit utterly fraught … listening experience.