Album Review: Imperishable - Revelation In Purity
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Fire heralds the triumvirate; men of means most foul, powers honed and magnified by experience, holders of wisdom on how best such strength is to be applied. Derek Roddy, suzerain of the drum stool, he, possessor of a hate eternal; in his dominion he reigns supreme – he is the king of all kings. Then comes Brian Kingsland, stern doctrinarian of the vile nilotic rites, scaled monarch of the gore-drunk dunes. Their number is completed by Alex Rush, who stood unflinching at the eye of Chaos and bore witness as it blinked first. That these men are talented goes without saying; you don’t penetrate the loftier echelons of death metal without knowing what you’re doing. Their gathering should portend iniquities most grievous – my expectations, correspondingly, clutch handholds on rungs in the starlight. In-as-much as I’m entitled to expect anything from men who owe me nothing, how does this new Imperishable release fare?
The Lord your God is a vengeful God, his word the law entire, that you thought it subject to change crime enough. Lightning fissures the shadow-black heavens and Kingsland’s fingers flex above the fretboard. The libidinous swine of all mankind wait breath bated for judgement to pass. Like thunders Whip Roddy bestows castigation, his work the manifold lash of the flickering scourge. His opening snare rolls conjoin with the deep bludgeon of tom hits to ram in puncture wounds that Kingsland’s riffs pack with poison. By his hands are devils both subterranean and aerial unified in conspiracy against man as low string palm mute notes counterpoint the invidious flare of black metal chords singing out o’er the high strings.
“Oath of Disgust”, it is whispered among the huddled masses as though in the knowing of it there may come some measure of mastery of the punishment due. Within it is made known the force of Alex Rush, his bass strings each a tendon sliced from those titanic canyon dwellers who now lie hobbled and whimpering at each quadrant of the compass; with it he drills tunnels beneath the mix, dark, filth-strewn and mildewed with the panicked breaths of a billion suffocating souls contained therein, heaving their last against damp stone walls. Speed. Discipline must come quickly, else the subject knows not what failing it acts to counter. As such, “Oath of Disgust” makes a friend of alacrity, sleek with blastbeats and intricate alt-picked riffs, yet forgetting not the brawn imbued in the groove, wisely enhancing the Devastation wrought with triplet chugs and percussive panache at 0.59 and again at 3.35.
The firmament shudders; melodies birthed from the blackest of nocturnes slit paths into our mortal coil. “Exclusion Continuum” alights, haloed by human-skin lanterns lit with flames that know no dousing. Ever more overt is the blackness, akin to the imperial might of an Emperor of old, strummed waves of open chords, leads like requiems for souls yet to see harvest, and ever the percussion of Roddy marching over the rubble like the living shade itself. There is no light but fire now, an ocean of it, drawing unto itself great sucking gales splintered with debris and shrieking bodies to feed an infernal yearning. Ravines like fleshwounds in the world itself shelter the dispossessed; so was it said that It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, and oh, if they did not have so very much to lose. Yet they have still more to give. At 1.53, the chasm walls, fire-weakened, quake and spit great boulders tumbling into the huddled pools of flesh below. Rush and Kingsland watch impassive and stoic above, the riven earth weak before their slams, as scarlet streams like asp bodies Slither paths through what passage cold stone permits.
“Speak” sayeth the lord unto his enforcers. “Give voice to thine displeasure”.
“My lord” cometh the reply “Our work is word enough”. Doom lurks in every string bend, each note, each pound of bloodied tom drums. “Revelation in Purity” - the dreadful end of a death that in itself sins through sloth. inexorable necrotism, meat black and reeking, the stale sweat of the long fever and watery excrement, as ordained by the final minute of this title track. Sweet venificium in excelsis! Conjure rot, conjure plague, conjure contagion, the haze the of the bloated corpse viscous to the naked eye, dotted with unnameable phylums of Carrion fly, thick and fat and greased with the pearl sheen of ocular gel. That it began as a pure exercise in classic death metal only bolsters the dirge it became at closure, the doleful declaration of it a contrast sublime in its animosity. There’s a brutality separate and immeasurable in it’s professionalism, as though those victims to which it’s might are subjected account for such scant regard as to render their mass slaughter an act of mere administration.
Some small number have thrown themselves unto the mercy of the one true god; their falsehoods renounced, idolatrous practices forsworn. The true of these few shall be spared. There exists no heart hidden from the eye of the lord. Those of them within which nestles the canker of recalcitrance merit no tenderness. For them there shall only be “Spewing Retrobution”. Kingsland draws upon the sum total of spite from the reign, aeons long, of scowling black-plumed Morbid Angels for leads that extract igneous torrents from the split earth below at 1.40; Formulas Fatal to the Flesh flensed from the Heretic at the Gateways to Annihilation cascade from his fingers in blistering hails. Elsewhere dwellings fracture and collapse before the peerless blastwork of Roddy, shattered stone and splintered beams fringed outwards as effigies to the arrogance that raised them. His cymbals cavort and dart through, punctuated spikes through the Symphony upon which the impaled stare blankly at forlorn skies.
The twitching husks of desiccated corpses line what roads remain, infinitesimal vestiges of the souls that once animated their limbs left caged within to scream silently at the ruin their hubris gifted them. “Iniquity” is measured, crafted in understanding that the pain of the body is one half of the interrogator’s art. The sinner must also comprehend what is being done to it, must know that it might live, but will not want to. It is this pain of the mind that Imperishable wield now. The bass of Rush pushes unmitigated weight onto prostrate limbs, squirting blood in jets measured by metres. First the feet. Then the shins. The thigh, though...best to not risk arterial rupture. A judicious swap to the hands, the forearms, ‘til all that remains is a limbless screaming torso insane with agony. Torture floors a thousand leagues or more long and wide reverberate to the abyssal hum of Rush’s bass, as the chants and echoing clean guitar of Kingsland spin melody into an abattoir, a slow massacre in countless cold chambers. Slow. Unceasing. Endless.
The end is nigh. Man is devastated, billions howling down to perdition’s gates. What remains is small, scattered, and clamped to what few spots hint at the possibility of arable potential. Trauma will be endemic for generations, And those women capable of carrying a child to term shall seldom see a healthy birth. Yet still there is more to do; traitors shelter in the flock, men whose ignoble dispositions would see the rest of all humanity speared on their silver tongues if the rot is permitted to set in. Grim-set visages of Roddy, Rush and Kingsland, in the comprehending of this, recognise their work to be unfinished. 2 further acts of harrowing violence are asked of them, and so 2 more they set out to inflict. The first is “Where Dead Omens Croon”. Perhaps the most evident example of the influence gained upon recognition that The Underworld Awaits Us All, swift, technical riffs snip mortal threads in twain. But yet...The masterstroke remains; Christ gazes in revulsion that his sacrifice was worth so little. God promised not to flood the earth. He said nothing of fire. All at once, as though man had not reason enough to Curse what ancient prometheus first scraped flint across stone to cast sparks out unto the waiting dark, creation entire is aflame.
From one end of the globe to another seas boil and scalding steam spews forth to comingle and commune with a rolling cacophony of smoke that chokes and smothers in a vast vaporous gyre of ember-flecked death scouring clear continents of all life from the proudest of men to the lowliest mite scratching a meagre paupers existence on the last fronds of vegetation left standing. It is called “The Enduring Light of Irreverence” and it is without question the apex of Imperishable’s accomplishments. The blackest, last bastion of pure holy terror. Rush’s bass powers through the mix like divine intervention, scoring welts in the wicked planet below. Kingsland’s lead work is at it’s most fluid, most scalding, most gracious and Roddy unleashes in an apocalyptic salvo smashing mile-wide craters with every snare hit, his kick drum the frantic heartbeat of a world in extremis. It dissolves and reforms, it’s tempo as malleable as the molten earth that fills the footprints behind it. It wreaks a punitive, final, and total havoc across seven celestially ordained minutes that cauterizes every viral speck of faithless heresy from the mind of man for all time to come.
Apart from in Britain because God said nah fuck it your food is mad underrated so we’re all good.
The Lord your God is a kind God also. Mercy stays the blade of his enforcers as once it did the fatal intent of Abraham as his son lay upon the altar. The album leaves untouched those most ruinous implements it has at command, never fully indulging the genocidal whims that skitter about its consciousness. The work is clean and clinical if not dispassionate, professional and practiced, not for it the barbarian edge a raw presentation may gift so much as the frosted sterility of the mortuary. Insofar as what remains of man has mind for much besides the lapping of wounds and terrified huddling in smoking craters, he may be thankful that the assault was not so vicious as to shuttle him to Extinction alongside any number of other fossilised once-was denizens of our tormented cinder-world. Sweet air, sunrise golden in a pale dawn, cool on the breeze. The arbiters exit, watching from afar until such time as man forgets the lessons taught this day. Sing glad psalms of hope and faith, for should treachery arise once more, should thy tread again wander from the light of the Lord, then as God wills they shall return.
And there will be nothing left when they do.
