Label - Unique Leader Records
Release Date- 12th August 2022
Words- Tony Bliss
Death metal can mean many different things to many different people. With over three decades of cross-pollination, and certain sub-strains and genre mutations seemingly popping up every week, the blood ‘n’ guts ethos of the old school is forever ripe for mangling, and there is always a mile-long queue of fresh-faced bands looking to salute the genres ancient code whilst simultaneously nudging boundaries and bending rules.
Carrion Vael are a perfect case in point. Wildly technical, pointedly melodic and obsessed with serial killers, theirs is a proudly all-encompassing approach that never strays too far from death metal's core essence of maximum brutality. With all that said, it should come as little surprise that Abhorrent Obsessions, the bands third full length, is pretty fucking special.
It takes no more than a minute for this Indiana death squad to establish their iron-clad credentials, as ‘Wings Of Deliverance’ explodes into life via some symphonic hugeness before switching gears into a melo-death firestorm of riffs, some lobotomised, Suffocation-esque slam grooves and a touch of Death’s later day melodic flair. And that's just the first track.
Further on, ‘King Of The Rhine’ is a particular highpoint, the band channeling The Black Dahlia Murder at their most steroidical and injecting yet a further nitro boost of guitar histrionics and high tension blasting, driven on by vocalist Travis Lawson Purcell who plunders his armoury of shrieks and grunts with spree-killer like glee. 'Kentucky Fried Strangulation' occasionally hits deathcore levels of thuggery between its insane speed and gothic grandeur, and ‘Tithes Of Forbearance’ even ushers in a mouth-watering morsel of clean vocals before a final collapse into pitiless, mid-paced sludge. ‘Disturbia’ then repeats the trick with a little more of Cynic or The Faceless’ space-faring weirdness.
As a bruising 'The Paint Shop' rounds things off, it's a done deal; Abhorrent Obsessions is the sort of metallic tour de force that we might expect from scene veterans, a riveting and refined tech-death colossus rendered in shades of all things cinematic and orchestral, and stuffed full of mini-epics that are never anything less than a thousand percent metal as all unholy hell. Seriously impressive.
9/10
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