À travers les lambeaux

The debut album of Canadian black-death-doom metallers Shezmu is here, promising brooding violence and captivating extremity.

Visceral riffs grind into a furious discordant array with pummelling drums. Spectral and bleak, with relentless malevolent energies, it takes seconds to realise just how grisly this record will be. The vocalist joins with guttural howls and adds more monstrosities to the expansive instrumental dreariness, encompassing all things extreme metal with the unhinged assaults. As we venture further into the album, it grows in a sickeningly twisted, warping fashion to disperse any light energies. The monolithic doom metal sections add atmospherics and groove to a discordant and eerie blend of blackened death metal to give us a vanquishing, mighty and gloriously evil soundscape. Contradicting this is some amazing classic guitar and tribal percussion to further the ritualistic feeling of the record while building even more tension towards the extreme metal destruction ahead.

Packed with creepily experimental and unorthodox songwriting and structures, Shezmu conjure up some ghastly musical concoctions to permeate the darkest realms of heavy metal. Cavernous and vicious guitars are carefully layered over thunderous drums and bass, filling every second with masterfully malignant music for the vocalist to howl maniacally to. With a strong vision and otherworldly approach, this is truly impeccable extreme metal that feels dangerous and at the same time like every single element, nuance and break has been thoroughly and finely put together with utmost care. This music will devour and irradiate anything in its obliterating pathway to carnage.

Amidst the hypnotic ambience we occasionally are just dropped into war metal style battery which together with the aforementioned doomy sections and more twisted ideas further adds a sense of unbalance and volatility to the onslaught. Drawing on more devilish energies, each piece ruptures the sound barrier with malice and perpetually dark soundscapes of pure disdain. With no remorse, the songs collide in spectacular fashion to conjure a storm of total chaos and hellish brutality. Although chaotic, there is a precision that drives the ferocity of the music incredibly hard into the brain, giving an inescapable and claustrophobic adrenaline to the musical excellence.

Truly an astounding debut album with every single element working beautifully to complement the last, delving into some of the more wonderfully malicious extreme metal realms one could hope for. A completely unhinged, unpredictable and unique slab of fantastically dense extreme metal that tortures the soul with its delightfully demonic apparitions.

Written for www.nattskog.wordpress.com