Maturum Est

This french black metal band, which I had never heard of until this album came out, marks the first raw, dirty, ear scorching black metal that I have really enjoyed this year. The dilemna I often run into is that I absolutely love the sound, but I can’t stand it when bands use it to play a thrashy or deathy or proggy abortion. Sacrificia Mortuorum produces one of the nastiest sounds I have ever heard in black metal, a combination of production and just rotten as hell instrumentation, but plays some fucking good songs with it.

While I can’t promise that this album is as gratifying over the long term as some other favorites from this year, I can promise that it is a fucking incredible listen. The sound never gets old for me. Way too much treble, it’s absolutely ear-splitting, with distorted french style screaming through a shitty mic, and ugly sounding drums. I’ve said before that a great sound by itself won’t carry an album, and Maturum Est is not carried by its sound.

The composition featured here is superb. It’s reminiscent of a kind of Judas Iscariot style but with more of the LLN sound. Long songs that are melodic in kind of a wretched way, except that in general the pace is a bit faster here than with most Judas Iscariot. The music vaults from slow, screeching, drawn out progressions, with an abnormally harsh lead melody over the top, and then goes into chaotic blast portions of just hitting every instrument as hard as possible. The screams are so rich and honest sounding that they work very well even when the music basically stands still, with just a scorching distorted background, and the screams play the lead so to speak.

What makes this music really interesting to me though is that it really is very melodic. There are no bullshit recycled riffs thrown in the songs when they run out of ideas, and there is no pointless droning passages or stupid feedback sessions. Maturum Est is just song after song of really great sounding riffs.

This isn’t ground breaking black metal. The sound has been done before. The style of the songs is nothing new (just thank god it’s not black/thrash, again…). But I’ll be damned if Sacrifica Mortuorum hasn’t done a fucking incredible job of doing all that stuff over again.