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HADOPELAGYAL “Haematophoryktos”
HADOPELAGYAL “Haematophoryktos”
By Dr. Abner Mality
Holy Cats, I’m a Doctor in multiple fields but even I had to look up the album title...I still don’t know what it means! I DO know that “HADOPELGYAL” has to do with the very deepest recesses of the ocean. So I got ready for something dark and heavy…
This creature of the abyss blew my cranium into orbit with some of the most cyclonic and relentless war metal of the year. I thought this might be doomy in the style of their labelmates LHAAD, but this is almost the opposite. Just a relentless wall of guitar noise that is a total wind tunnel. Usually I don’t care for such an approach, because riffs and rhythms get blown away, yet I found HADOPELAGYAL to be extremely powerful. They create a ferocious drone that hypnotizes the brain and puts you in a trance. Once in that trance, odd shifts in tone become apparent. Not riffs as such, but something buried in the music.
The band’s song titles are as long-winded and pretentious as you might expect so I won’t spend much time with them. But tracks three and four do feature slight breaks into more mid-paced cavernous gloom that pack an awesome punch. The vocals are the cataclysmic roars you would expect, nothing new there. The album’s last track amazes, because it starts with a super ominous orchestral part that is every bit as compelling as the warcrush. When that finally kicks in about halfway through the track, it is almost majestic.
Such a strange mixture of BLASPHEMY, SUNN 0))), WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM and INCANTATION, yet it works. Just get ready to be blown apart!
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