Label - Candlelight Records
Release Date- 7th October 2022
Words - Tony Bliss
Riffs. Inordinate fistfuls of sustained, riff-driven punishment. By all accounts, California natives Armed For Apocalypse are all thoroughly bloody nice chaps, however as long-time fans will know, shut them in a room with their instruments and they sound somewhat akin to being submerged in a lake of boiling tar. Ritual Violence, the bands third full length LP, is almost absurdly crushing, a black hole-esque meeting point between bowel-loosening sludge and acid-damaged extremity that looks to funnel every pent up frustration since 2018’s Palm Reader EP directly and gleefully into our ear holes.
From the off, ‘Under My Shame’ stomps and slams like the re-animated corpse of nu-metal’s darkest and most violent moments being filtered through the bilious hate-spew of a Primitive Man or Will Haven AND some NOLA-inspired swing, an expectedly immaculate Kurt Ballou production job immediately obvious as the opening riff goes off like Vesuvius. From here on out, it certainly doesn't get any more pleasant. ‘Frail’ is a d-beat firestorm, avowedly punk in spirit until a hideous closing breakdown drops the pace to an ugly, agonizing crawl. Recent ‘single’ ‘Full Of Phlegm’ and the following ‘Hourglass’ both sound like a demon-possessed Crowbar with the aggression counter wedged firmly in the red, before ‘Lifeless’ touches grindcore levels of intensity, and is as typically bereft of hope as anything before it.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest strength of Ritual Violence is that these eleven tracks are, crucially, unafraid to bow out when all has been said. With only four cuts exceeding the four-minute mark, this is a record that may at times be heroically claustrophobic and relentless, however, Armed For Apocalypse always have a seemingly instinctive sense of when it’s time to stop aurally clubbing us over the head, some atmospheric rest bites in ‘Live Through The Storm’ and closer ‘Eternally Broken’ (otherwise a doom-sludge horrorshow) further proof that there must be a slight sense of mercy in their ranks somewhere. Make no mistake, however, this is a lumbering, spitting and snarling monster that for the vast majority of its forty-minute run-time wants to bury you alive in sonic concrete. Riffs.
8/10
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