While their 2013 debut Exhaust brought little new to the deathcore table, it did prove the Germans’ adherence to the heavier end of the craft. This follow-up may have a few more eerie harmonies thrown in on Todestreiben and an occasional nod to Machine Head’s Burn My Eyes, but this is largely the same guttural meat’n’potatoes fare.
Yet rather than just another sterile box-ticking exercise, SOS’s trump card is the sheer ferocity and efficiency they deliver. Drummer Dennis Kosinski does his upmost to cram too many beats into each song, with the riffs matching up with the double bass drum with clinical precision. The grim, indecipherable grunts and squeals are delivered with a feral intensity on Plainfield, Columns Of Greed shifts from savage dissonance to a brutish subdrop, while the only response to Swamp is to find the nearest wall and violently smash through it. Hellmouth is proof that when the basics are done with such aplomb this is a genre that still has he power to thrill.
