Album Review: Sepulchral Curse - Abhorrent Dimensions
Reviewed by Sam Jones
If there’s one band that’s beginning to grab attention in Finland these days, it’s Sepulchral Curse as they prepare to unleash their second full length work of blackened death metal. Formed in 2013 in Turku, Finland, Sepulchral Curse have been gradually building a catalogue of material stretching from 2016’s At The Onset Of Extinction EP, to 2020’s first album offering with Only Ashes Remain, 2022’s EP Deathbed Sessions, and this year’s Howl Of The Cursed EP too. Now, with their second album prepped for release, and their band lineup only changing to see Johannes Rantala mark his first album credit with the band, I was curious to see where the band would go with this new record. Penned down for an October 27th release date and via Transcending Obscurity Records, this is bound to be one album the label is sure to market to its greatest efforts.
It must be said that Sepulchral Curse don’t exactly hold their sound back, as they hurl this exceptional soundscape upon our senses. It’s not enough merely to say it’s vast and far-reaching; it’s more accurate it day the band blow down all walls this record feebly attempts to erect. The riffs, drums, the full songwriting crushes all barriers that would dare pen this record in and thus your entire sonic horizon is wholly consumed by the band’s performance. While their onslaught is defeating and truly without mercy, I appreciate how the volume isn’t so great that I felt any need to turn it down at all. The opening track, “Onward The Legions”, is a fantastic opening track because it introduces audiences to the kind of blistering vortex they’ll be subjected to for the next thirty-six minutes, yet the band have ensured their sound is prominent in space as well as volume, hence why this record feels as massive as it does; Abhorrent Dimensions feels as grand as it does since, had the band hemmed things in, we would have needed to hinder our en experience just to make out what was going on.
As for the vocals, this is one meaty, malevolent performance. There’s no hope making out a coherent word being pronounced, it’s clear the band cite the vocals as another instrumental element for the atmosphere they’re vying for will leave no thought for lightening the tone or vocal delivery. The sheer depths these vocals are diving to is extraordinary, harkening back to death metal’s earliest days when this guttural form was still in its infancy. However, although the band do throw numerous elements at you at once, with no hint of a respite in sight at any point, the vocals never feel at risk of being overplayed and overpowered. I think it’s down to the sheer power these vocals have been able to exert for the absolute might inherent in every demonic syllable feels primed for the kill; the energy that’s being put into them is astounding and, although the vocals are slower than the instrumentation, that delivery never wanes or feels to lose its place for another faster, vicious riff or drum attack.
The vocals may be performed with a certain tempo in mind, likely due to individual capability, but that doesn’t prevent the riffs from being possessed by an adrenaline to make even the most hardened combatant pause. Abhorrent Dimensions is not an album to take you by the band and ease you into each of its myriad parts, it’s going to throw you over the cliff edge and wish you luck as you’re soon swarmed by everything the band could ever muster against you. These rapid fire riff segments aren’t merely chunky either, since their resonance can move from fatter chords right to the more slicing and tenebrous forms of guitar playing, truly evoking and putting the name in the band’s blackened death metal style, to a far greater extent than other bands have done so. Here, it truly feels like blackened death metal is a fully realised concept, as opposed to merely taking some elements of death or black metal and then shoehorning them into the other; Abhorrent Dimensions is a record where it’s difficult to discern where one style ends and the other begins. The speed feels doubly more impactful throughout this record than others you will have heard this year, I believe, due to the mix. We’ve touched upon how this record’s walls were blasted down with ease, the fact that these guys are throwing so much tempo into their performance only makes their production all the more sinister and volatile.
When I say the bass is vast, I don’t mean to say that there’s a lot being pumped into the mix, I mean to say the bass is absolutely colossal. For a record that’s this willing not to fit within the four sonic walls, a bass this powerful was needed to flow and underlay the band’s performance with enough foundation for everything to explode at every given moment. But it’s easily during the band’s drumming, when the bass drums are incorporated without restraint, that their bass in instrumentation and mix truly comes into its own, heralding a new stratosphere of power into an already supercharged album experience. When these instances come into play, at least two such moments with every track herein, the band’s presence and impact multiples nigh on exponentially until that scope of intensity begins to waiver or drops accordingly to the songwriting’s demands. Also amplified by the sheer expanse of this album’s sound, the bass drums don’t simply end when the strike is rung for the petering bass kicks continue to bellow into the distance only for the next flurries to follow and build unto this cacophony; couple this with the band’s approach to riffs and vocals and this is a seriously uncompromising, ruthless record.
In conclusion, Abhorrent Dimensions has more in common with being run down by an oncoming tank than being compared to the current ilk of blackened death metal acts. This was the fastest album under forty minutes I’ve experienced in some time and it’s down to how this was written, mixed and performed to create that intended effect. An absolutely diabolical, seething album that will cave every rib in your body and break your innards backwards if it must, yet it’ll see you crawling, bent double and crippled, back for second and third helpings. The utter scale this album aspires for, yet doesn’t fill in that space with rudimentary ambient effects or samples, is commendable; Sepulchral Curse evidently wanted this to be as grounded as they could whilst still devastating every bone in our bodies. Their first album in three years, Abhorrent Dimensions is the breakout record the band deserve. A stellar work of Finnish death metal.
