Album Review: Outergods - Dethroned & Devoured
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
It seems unfashionable these days to exhibit any form of national pride. There’s a level to which that’s easily understandable – after all, forteen years of hopeless Tory nonsense has been dreadfully unkind to my fair isle. Austerity was embarrassingly stupid on a conceptual level and morally revolting on a practical one, and things only seemed to get worse from there. As it stands now, virtually everything is worse than it used to be. Our NHS is a creaking, underfunded mess. Our fire and police services both cored. Our Covid response so horribly mismanaged – criminally botched by a clutch of miserable human failures, really - that we British suffered more death and more economic damage than any comparable European nation, literally the worst of both worlds. Our housing prices are ridiculous, and our cost of living exorbitant – small wonder so many forgo having children, given the number of zeroes on the price tag. Our job markets are unforgiving, our impoverished growing, and our scandalous insistence on punishing the vulnerable through successive benefits cuts reprehensible. Brexit won us virtually nothing compared to the costs involved. Even the idea of national pride, hell, even so much as an affinity or fondness for Britain is inextricably tied up with the brainless droolings of bigoted halfwits who have never seen a problem they couldn’t reflexively blame on immigrants. So yeah, I can see why someone might feel disillusioned with our green and pleasant land.
But I will always maintain that Britain's musical contributions are worthy of the highest esteem, and the sheer quality of British metal acts around the country should be a source of considerable uplift for any Briton aware of them.
Outergods. The promo list said “black/grind”. Not altogether incorrect, but not altogether encompassing either. The heart is black, that much is for sure. Seething and misanthropic. But it’s blackened in the way that Anaal Nathrakh are blackened; yes, the family tree branches out from Darkthrone, Emperor and Bathory – but there is so much else afoot here. Dark, oily tides from all seas lap the shore, malformed detritus left gasping its last on coarse, cold sands. Its epics, “A Mausoleum at the Edge of Time” foremost in mind, sprawl; their melodious inclinations let fly in portentous downpours as enthralling as they are mournful. Elsewhere, a scathing groove bookended by acerbic blastbeat bombardments and an irrepressible chorus on “Cosmic Abomination” knocks jawbones loose, swinging feeble and defanged from a bruised hammock of limp flesh. Should the album simply wish to set all before it to the torch, it can draw the unrelenting obsidian hardcore of “Sprawling Chaos” from the holster. The war chest is deep, and filled with blades a-plenty. Industrial textures clamber the skin of it, the eldritch shriek of feedback on “Origin” carving serration into it’s black steel, whereas “Phantasm” uses the chemical wash of ambience to bolster it’s grandeur.
As much as anything else I think these days I find not variety itself impressive so much as cohesion in spite of variety. It would be one thing for an album to throw, say, a punk song here, a reggae song there, some avante-garde classical piece next, a bit of free jazz, so on and so forth. But the result would be a compilation, a work of dizzying scope but potentially little focus or even identity to call its own. It’s when bands can wield so broad an array of projectile weaponry but still emerge feeling like themselves that I find myself seriously impressed. So when I hear the arctic blizzard of black metal scour the landscape alongside dingy, grime-streaked industrial clamour slide natural as you like over to bitter crust punk or inflamed melodeath passages (see “Sparagmos” for the band at their most neck-threateningly vitriolic) my resulting grin spans time zones. An eye cast over the tracklist would tell you that at this point I’ve named and praised almost all the songs here for one reason or another. But then, that will happen when every song here is so very good. However, in the time honoured tradition of being pedantically critical of a release in case of polishing a band’s ego to too glossy a sheen, let’s have a stab at being mean for a second:
While I like virtually all the material presented, I’ve got some quarrels with the production. I’d like more bass to it for one thing - the album is turgid with these huge, sweeping aural vistas; I imagine them with the systolic thump of a more prominent bass and wish for a version of the album that doesn’t exist. Though bass isn’t always an element prioritised in the grim and frostbitten kingdom of black metal, just yesterday I was listening to Mayhem’s classic “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” – the sickly fuzz of Necrobutcher’s bass fortifies Euronymous’ guitar lines so well it’d be criminal for the album to forgo it. I’d render similar praise of Sodom’s magnificent “In The Sign of Evil” EP, or a dozen others off the top of my balding cranium. With Outergods the bass isn’t entirely absent - especially in some of the thrashier sections it can be quite obvious - but broadly speaking it’s often very much in the background, which strikes me as something of a shame. I’ve a minor gripe with the album sequencing too - neither “Phantasm” nor “The Sleepless Malice” are bad songs, but they are two of the slower cuts available on average, and at 6 minutes each placing them back to back feels like it stalls momentum a mite, irrespective of the brief divergences into brisker waters that both songs take once apiece. There’s probably an argument somewhere that some judicious pruning on some of the longer songs might perhaps be in order but I’m not the one to make it - where and when to apply the required ablation eludes me completely. Even as the closing moments of the final song splays it’s skeletal fingertips to just shy of 10 minutes, it never felt as long as you might think.
I bought this awesome album-cover longsleeve shirt from Outergods’ Bandcamp page the first day I listened to this album in full. There’s a genuine elation I get with stuff like this. World beating British metal. I felt it as I watched Evile leading the pack of thrash revivalists in the early 2000s. I feel it as I note the Carcass worship coursing through the modern goregrind undergrowth. As I watched Judas Priest tear through an immaculate setlist last year, I felt it. And I feel it once more with Outergods. It’s always a true pleasure to report on an excellent album, and I feel as though I’ve been on something of a streak in that regard lately, but it’s important for the health of the metal scene as a whole to show support to those bands within your own shores. To that end, I’m positively elated to report that Outergods have here graced us with a superlative benediction from enigmatic, shaded deities that belongs in your collection the second it drops.
