Nightbringers

Nocturnal, Deflorate, Ritual, Everblack. Some might call this a winning streak, but I call it the quad-barreled rocket launcher from Commando. Sadly, Abysmal was the equivalent of Bugs Bunny stuffing his fingers down the barrels and making everything cartoonishly explode into black soot. I found so little to enjoy about that point-blank clusterfuck of an album, that I felt legitimate dread before sitting down with Nightbringers. Little did I know I had nothing to worry about. I hold this album in dizzingly high esteem, better in some respects than even Nocturnal. Holy Mother of Satan. This album is just... Who is Satan's mother, anyway? He must have had one. I wonder what she looked like, because Lucifer himself is looking really hot in most pictures... Damn it, Tanuki, focus!

Despite lasting a mere half hour, Nightbringers feels like a complete experience, thorough in its understanding of melody-driven death metal, and designed from beginning to end with a definitive structure in mind. It is mature, thick, haughty... Sorry, I'm thinking about Satan's mom again. My biggest issue with Abysmal was the non-sequitur song structures, sounding almost AI-generated with how capricious and haphazard they seemed. Here, Baroque riffs are expertly punctuated with ghoulish guitar solos, frontflipping into the spotlight with astounding confidence. It is a marked improvement over the single stanzas of socially awkward blues licks Abysmal squirted into every composition. As crazy as it sounds, the acrobatic sweeps of 'Kings of the Nightworld' wouldn't sound out of place in a thrash-leaning USPM record like Nosferatu, Transcendence, or Endless War.

As a whole, this album illustrates what an immense journey TBDM has undertaken since the callow Unhallowed, which was just a stone's throw from IKEA melodeath like Construcdead or Enemy Is Us. I would go so far as to say Nightbringers is a technical advancement over Deflorate, commanding a vivid strata of influence that's still chiefly based around the likes of Sacrilege and At the Gates, but extends far beyond mere Gothenburg pageantry. The pungent grove and ambitious harmonics of the title track sounds very Gorod-influenced, and showcases a cathedralic solo that'd make Simon Belmont wet himself. Elsewhere, we have 'Matriarch' and 'Of God and Serpent' both riveted in place by chunky Coroner-esque tech riffs, and the trenchant blood 'n' guts riffing of 'Jars', which feels like a passionate love-letter to the mad butchery of Scream Bloody Gore and Altars of Madness.

Most notable of all is the hellacious crowd favorite 'Widowmaker'. In spite of its high velocity, this composition follows an urbane waltz time signature. Much like the song's subject matter, it comes across sounding unnervingly composed, in spite of its ruthlessness. To that end, I'm delighted to add that Black Dahlia's sinister prose came back with a vengeance here, sounding fresh and fully roused. Specific mention has to go to the diabolic 'Kings of the Nightworld' for reminding everyone that Hell is still relevant and cool, and 'Matriarch' for narrating from the perspective of a lady driven mad by inability to have a child. The exceptions are 'As Good As Dead', which is another composition that foreshadows Trevor's tragic passing, and 'The Lonely Deceased', which simply has a bit of over-edginess to it, with gratuitous descriptions of a mortician with a little too much job satisfaction. I get it, gross-out paraphilias is part of the death metal experience, but c'mon. Can't a death metal band just scream about Satan's hot mom, instead?