Album Review: New World Depression - Abysmal Void
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
You can do a lot with death metal, and in my ample bosom lurks love enough for all of it. Einstein taught us that we shall never reach light speed, which only proves that he never heard Colombian death metal. The Swedish on the other hand gained infamy for the unbelievable heaviness of their guitar tone (even though, of the “big 4” Swedeath groups – Entombed, Dismember, Unleashed and Grave – only Entombed and Dismember used the classic HM2). So on and so forth – Texas was a nexus for slam, whereas Canada sports notable examples of genius in the field of tech death. So many places, so many people, so many bands. So much brilliance throughout all of it. But yet, in this fascinating mass of regional scenes, trendsetters, and electrifying musical progeny, there remains a truth as inflexible as tungsten: There is only one Bolt Thrower.
Less a band than an inexhaustible phalanx of riffs, over the course of their lifespan – tragically truncated at the passing of drummer Martin Kearns – they amassed a modest but untouchable repertoire of eight albums, all of which fall on the right side of “good” and most being one shade or another of fucking excellent. Melodic without the faintest erosion of their metallic edge and heavy beyond mortal reckoning, their cult status as immortalised masters (Warmasters, if you will) of British death metal makes all the sense in the world. Small wonder then that the seam they struck gold in so many times before has also been so thoroughly mined by other groups – Graceless, Just Before Dawn, Chainsword...the list goes on for a while, and while all these bands are good no one has ever quite done it as well as the original. And this is where we introduce New World Depression and their newest opus “Abysmal Void”. So, will it be the mechanised tonnage of massed armour divisions? Or the type of bloody farce that lord Kitchener specialised in engineering?
WW1 was a rude awakening for a lot of generals. A good chunk of them still thought in terms of colonial warfare; cavalry charges, advancing in lines, bayonets, that sort of thing. Completely unfit for the gruelling nightmare of trench warfare. Even when the first tanks appeared they were viewed more as an aberrant product of unique circumstances than a fundamental shift in the means of making war. No one appears to have told New World Depression any of this, because their music is the rumble of caterpillar tracks and the hot steel clank of the breech locking shut against the rear of a sabot round. It’s there, waiting in the calm before the storm, when the whirr of the tank turret stops just long enough you to hope it can’t see you before the cannon roars hellfire and transforms the world around you into a screeching armageddon of shrapnel, earth and flame. Mid-paced metal tsunamis of palm mutes riding a convulsing carpet of implacable percussion like “Carnage” bury themselves to the hilt whereas the brisker, cloying harmonies of “Burning Down” sweep in like gusting billows of poison gas.
Bolt Thrower might be the chief ingredient, but there is more to the cocktail than that alone. Vocalist Hütte bellows like a stabbed basilisk in a way that suggests there’s at least one common ancestor between him and Martin van Drunen from Asphyx, and the influence of that band only becomes more obvious when luxuriating in the noxious chugging death/doom of “Spoils of War”. In the aftertaste comes the mouldering stench of Obituary, sweet and ripe. Even so, despite this slightly wider palette, there’s points where Abysmal Void is derivative almost to the point of parody. The main riff to “Marching on our Graves” for one example is uncomfortably close to “Those Once Loyal”, and overall the vague suspicion that the band might have kidnapped Gavin Ward and Barry Thomson and locked them in a suitcase until they tell them where they hid all the riffs that didn’t make it onto “Honour, Valour, Pride” is borderline inescapable throughout.
Depending on what you’re looking for there’s a few ways you could walk off feeling about Abysmal Void, but probably the best frame of mind to engage it with is holding the expectation of a good, solid slab of hefty but melodic riffs that wouldn’t set the speed cameras off but might flatten them instead. It’s only serious flaw is just how much of its identity is owed to a very slim snippet of references, but a British challenger two tank weighs around sixty two tons and therefore doesn’t need to be original to grind you beneath it’s axles nonetheless. We may never hear a band that does that Bolt Thrower sound as well as Bolt Thrower did but while we wait for one to come along, there’s a war on, and New World Depression needs YOU. Sign up today, and revel in the coming slaughter.
