Ulsect

Ulsect was a band that I found after this album was suggested to me on Bandcamp. While I like that platform, finding quality music can sometimes be a crapshoot; there will be a few good albums here and there, and a handful of great ones that become personal favorites, but most of the time the music (metal especially, it seems) isn't really anything to write home about. No such poor luck here.

Born from former members of Exivious, Textures and the like, Ulsect make death metal in a similar vein as Gorguts or Ulcerate. (Huh...Ulcerate, Ulsect...coincidence, maybe?) The music relies heavily on dissonance and atmosphere, and while it is certainly technical in a sense, there is a rawness here that hearkens back to the olden days of death metal, when Morbid Angel wasn't an industrial metal band and Opeth wasn't a fucking "progressive" rock band. (Short sidebar: can we stop calling Opeth's current sound "progressive rock?" Copying the sound of bands from 30-40 years ago is literally the antithesis of "progressive.")

The album kicks off really strongly (and very promptly) with the opener "Fall to Depravity"; there's not much fucking around to speak of here - no overblown intro tracks, no half-assed "ambient" soundscapes. Within the first 60 seconds or so, the vocals have come in, and while they're not that different from the standard death growls to which we've become so accustomed, they are delivered with a passion that makes them a true joy to listen to.

The dynamics on the album are another strong suit; "Fall to Depravity" is a good example of this, with a lengthy bridge wherein the band hits a couple of notes unified together, and then allows them to ring out for several moments, emphasizing the space between notes rather than the notes themselves. "Moirae," one of two instrumental tracks on the album, employs a similar trick, but slows the tempo to a doomier speed, further emphasizing the band's "soft" side (I put quotation marks around the word "soft" because even when this album does slow down or soften up, there's still a lingering level of brutality). Throughout this album, there are several moments of excellent dynamics. You could name practically any track and there would likely be a significant dynamic shift somewhere in its runtime.

As far as complaints for this album, I do have a couple. For a start, the sound is a little one-dimensional. The band never really breaks this "brutal-with-the-occasional-soft-part" song structure of the album, but since there's only 42-ish minutes of material here, it's not like they're beating a dead horse or anything like that. The mixing is also a little spotty on the album; the cymbals especially seem to blur the mix occasionally, and the vocals are pushed a bit further back than I would like them to be. However, there are a handful of bands who also have slightly messy/blurry mixing that works for their style (Inter Arma comes to mind, as well as Uncle Acid & the deadbeats), but the problem is that Ulsect's particular style would certainly benefit from a clearer, slightly more sympathetic mix. Finally, I think the production on the album is a bit lackluster; while there are some reverse swells and the occasional bit of harsh noise, Ulsect are left to carry most of the album on their own, and with eight tracks that all sound somewhat similar to each other, that's a bit of an iffy prospect.

Overall, though, I still quite liked the album, and will definitely be looking out for Ulsect's next release. My hope is that they'll try pushing the dynamics on their next batch of tunes even further, maybe even having one or two tracks that sit completely on either end of the heaviness spectrum, and that the production and mixing are both a little punchier as well.

RIP Textures; long live Ulsect.