Bedtime for Mercy

It’s a shame that I forget Natron when I talk about 90’s Italian technical/progressive death metal; the main reason for this injustice must be that the first work I heard from them was “Rot Among Us” (2009) which was a pretty straight-forward affair the band having shaken off most of their technical, intricate veneer. I only rediscovered them once a friend played “Livid Corruption” for me, one of his most favourite death metal albums, and this was when I decided to track down their past repertoire.

The band were pioneers in the field in their homeland alongside the better known Sadist, first under the Piper of Hamelin moniker, and were one of the artists to form the core of the genre over there which was later enriched with the addition of other talented outfits like Algophobia, Aydra, Gory Blister, etc. Their full-length debut was second only to the one of Sadist, seeing them looking at the Florida movement for inspiration, and finding it in the early twisted opuses of Deicide, above all. Although in terms of originality and creativity Natron couldn’t quite reach the heights of their Sadistic colleagues, by the time of their sophomore “Negative Prevails” they managed to come up with a more individual style characterized by quite complex, often quite speedy and brutal, riff applications, the guitars accompanied by a heavy, also sterile at times, reverberation making the music difficult to place strictly within the old school confines although there’s nothing even remotely close to the bleak, mechanical landscapes of, say, their compatriots Node.

The album reviewed here is a nice representation of the band’s diverse, rich in detail approach which befuddles the listener with “Overblood”, first with a cavalcade of jarring staccato riffs, then with surreal atonal rhythms and maddening dazzling brutality pirouettes this varied, charmingly chaotic amalgam humbly assisted by roaring shouty vocals. The mentioned ingredients are used on almost every subsequent composition their symbiosis brought to its immediate extreme on the brief shredding delight “Less than Human”, and expanded to a marvellous, multifarious progressive march ala Theory in Practice and Anata on the superb amorphous title-track. “Astroblaster”, contrary to its title, is not exactly a blaster, but is a supreme display of technical wizardry which goes towards the pyrotechnics’ provision school where Necrophagist and Kataplexy belong. The second half goes in the same direction although “A Treacherous Wish” desirably slows down the proceedings with heavier, stomping escapades, and “Nothingface” injects a solid doze of surreality into the album with its alluring spacey, psychedelic vistas those indeed recalling the song’s godfathers Voivod. “Crypt of Sexorcism” is a breeze of more direct bashing, and “Sleep of Dead” is a masterpiece, a carnival of spastic, shape-shifting riff-formulas with echoes of Theory in Practice again, with atmospheric respites alternating with some of the most abrupt, unpredictable time shifts around.

At the time when their main rivals on home ground Sadist shifted gears with the not very impressive, also quite divisive, “Lego”, Natron hit with arguably their magnum opus. A full-on display of technical/progressive death metal craftmanship, this effort literally marked the climax for the genre development on Italian soil, with most of the mentioned acts producing their finest hours around the same time. From that moment onward, with the leaders Sadist also disappearing from sight, the movement entered a period of stagnation, not a big intimidating one, but one that obviously didn’t have this huge creative pool at its disposal anymore from which it borrowed so readily a few years back. Our friends here pulled themselves together for one more impressive opus, the mentioned “Livid Corruption”, four years later which was a thick miasmic twisted “beast” with echoes of Immolation, Demilich and Morbid Angel, still retaining the band’s characteristic signature. With its potent, cavernous dark sound it boded more good things for its creators, but it had no immediate follow-up, and when the latter (“Rot Among US”) eventually came out after a lengthy hiatus, it was a fairly disappointing fare with a much more stripped-down, more immediate delivery.

The last opus was by no means a flop, but in the company of talented newcomers like Henker, Chronic Hate, Hatred, Deceptionist, Human, Murder Therapy, etc. populating the Italian underground the band simply had to do much better than that. “Grindermeister” (2012) was a re-recording of old songs of theirs, and didn’t contribute much to their name and reputation. However, I would still bet on these Pipers of Bari any time since they would always find their way regardless of how many devious paths they have chosen to shift from their stellar status.