Irish death metal band Malthusian return here with second album The Summoning Bell, and from the outset it’s clear that this a band keen to make an impression. Ominous chugging ushering in tracks which seep and entwine their way around your senses, this is deep, dark, metal. They may make their home through death metal roots but the path they take is a long, doom-laden one.
‘Red, Waiting’ is the first indication of this as it takes an age to build into a monolithic funereal march. It’s only the production which keeps it away from pure doom territory as the murky atmosphere evokes a sense of absolute horror. ‘Between Dens And Ruins’ may be more atypical with its crunching riffs and double bass drum ratcheting up a terrific tension. The deep growls, giving away to tortured shrieks are the icing on the cake.
It’s not an easy listen, although the band do spare you some of the brutality that exists within so much new death metal. The title track even throws in some melodic riffs to keep things from sinking deeper into the murk. This only serves to make those moments where the band let loose all the more heavier. On ‘Eroded Into Superstition’ they become the aural equivalent of a video nasty which is just want you want from this type of music. There’s a particularly illuminating part where a disembodied voice rants out of the raging torment about prophecies and so on. Pure death metal chaos.
‘Amongst The Swarms Of Vermin’ takes things to its logical conclusion in a fifteen minute excursion into the bowels of hell. Depressingly bleak, it then revs up the riff ratio into a stunning maelstrom of blackened noise. ‘In Chaos, Exult’ is almost an afterthought after this, although even that builds into a crescendo of hypnotic riffs and garbled vocals.
The Summoning Bell is an album you are going to need to spend time with to really enjoy. The murkiness can feel too much at times but given repeated listens, the music unfurls into something quite dramatic and encompassing. You sense that this is a band unafraid to break genre conventions at some point and this makes them an exciting proposition. A few festival slots should hopefully open them up to a wider audience although you do also hope they retain this level of experimentation. A dark, bleak album.
