Beliefs of Dead Stargazers and Soothsayers

A solid slab of imaginative if direct death metal out of that Brisbane, Pustilence, despite their moniker, eke out abstract and surprisingly meditative lyrical themes to accompany this diverse broth of traditional death metal riffcraft and pronounced melodic character. Chaos meets premeditation as passages of blast-beating chromatic madness collide with reflective and at times soaring, epic lead guitar work. Guttural vocals complete the picture, delivering the emotional core of the music with solidity, whilst containing enough controlled power to add an undeniably calculating vibe resting beneath the hyperactivity of the foreground.

If we’re speaking in terms of “old school” death metal (which, let’s face it, we usually are), then the production on ‘Beliefs of Dead Stargazers and Soothsayers’ captures that moment in the early 1990s when death metal found a powerful, assertive footing, building on the framework pioneered by Scott Burns, but dispensing with the dirge of bass heavy mud that so many Morrisound releases became. The guitar tone is thick and monstrous, but untroubled by surplus inertia it is free to flesh out at times complex three dimensional riff interplay alongside transparent brutality.

Drums offer an equally well balanced split between raw, adrenaline fuelled power and nuance. They do a good job of bringing the more regal aspirations of this album into the mechanistically efficient arena of percussive death metal by chopping up the flow of the riffs into moments of controlled disorder, adding layers of anomie to further augment the exchanges of harmony and atonality.

Pustilence may slot neatly into death metal’s current hegemony of 90s navel gazing, but the ability to string riffs together that appear conflicted at the molecular level, but nevertheless unite around a common purpose when absorbed from a distance marks this out as very much its own entity beyond subgenre trend quibbling. Equally, the production is not a carefully crafted collection of retro tropes, but actually seems bent toward bringing this healthy stew of angular death metal riffage to life, giving it the strongest possible platform by which to express itself.

Originally published at Hate Meditations