Impetuous Ritual - Blight Upon Martyred Sentience album review

With their perverse tonality crossing into realms of avant-garde noise, Impetuous Ritual’s hellscapes are as oppressive as extreme metal gets. It takes deft compositional control to prevent this style from becoming unlistenable downpours of static, yet the quartet – two of whom warp time and space with Portal – know how to engage listeners while still pushing towards the outré limits. Sonically, Blight Upon… is a vast improvement over the band’s previous two albums. The clarity and seismic clout of the production heightens the nightmarish abstractism of opener Void Cohesion, whose subsonic drones sound like tectonic plates being shattered. In contrast, Apoptosis and Inordinate Disdain hurl forth frenzied DM with atonal leads that squeal from within the howling chaos. The remaining songs play on variations of these stylistic paradigms and by the time the cataclysmic and probing Intransience slithers to its dark ambient end, you’ll be exhausted, delirious and possibly catatonic.