Release Date- 9th September 2022
Label - Metal Blade Records
Words - Tony Bliss
With each new album always threatening to be a genuine classic, Massachusetts trio Revocation have been a consistently brilliant and not a little underrated force in the modern extreme metal scene for some time now. 2018’s The Outer Ones was an undoubted high-point for the band thus far, anchoring their sound in a churning, visceral strain of Lovecraftian horror, and much like its predecessor, Neverheaven is Revocation at their most wilfully extreme and dark-hearted. However, whereas The Outer Ones was more uncoiling tentacles, astral terror and rampaging Xenomorphs, Netherheaven reeks of brimstone and is aglow with sonic hell-fire.
Superficially, it could be said that little about the band's sound has changed here beyond the record's running lyrical theme, however, as the album unfolds it becomes clearer and clearer just how much that new-found sense of textual/thematic ungodliness has possessed every aspect of Revocations sound. Be it the deliciously evil ‘Nihilistic Violence’ (all diminished chords and abyss-conjuring weirdness), or the records unholy triumvirate of ‘Strange And Eternal’, ‘Galleries Of Morbid Artistry’ and ‘The 9th Chasm’ funnelling a Styxian lava flow of surreal satanic violence into our lug 'oles, the band are still informed by the haughty dynamics of peak Gorguts and mid-era/later day Death, yet it's Neverheaven’s by design dedication to aural blasphemy that provides these nine tracks with their sonic core. And as you would expect, it’s 100% metal as fuck.
Indeed, each of these songs offers a different way of saluting the great horned one, either via the gruesomely heavy or the pointedly progressive. Opener ‘Diabolic Majesty’ is a straight-up death metal shit-kicker, at times recalling a nitro-boosted Asyphx in full flight, and ‘Godforsaken’ balances the trios more high-minded artistic devilry (just check out the stunning mid-section lead break) with a backbone of adrenaline-fuelled, skull-cracking slam grooves. Special mention also must go to ‘Re-Crucified’, a track not only bolstered by the distinctive gut-rattling pipes of George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher and the unhallowed shrieks of a much missed Trevor Strnad, but also built on a head-long stampede of nose-flattening extremity that (aside from being a career pinnacle for the band) ends the record on the sort of gloriously hellish full stop that would send many of our worlds quasi-Satanists fleeing for the local clergyman. Grab your crucifix, reel off a few Hail Mary’s and douse yourself in holy water, Revocation are here to prove that the devil still has the best tunes.
8/10
Comments