Album Review: Umulamahri - Learning the Secrets of Acid
Reviewed by Patrick O’Reilly
As the album title suggests, we are in the realms of psychedelia here, but not as your parents would know it... This is no Woodstock hippie fest ‘open your mind... turn on, tune in, drop out’ this is something much darker. This is a real bad trip, a glimpse into dimensions unreal and horrifying, a place where only madness dwells...
Umulamahri are a new band who have just unleashed their debut album into an unsuspecting world. Straight away the cover art should be a warning, a grim Daliesque depiction of a skeleton melting into an alien landscape, and it’s a pretty good metaphor for their music.
‘Learning the secrets of acid’ is filled with bizarre riffs, blasts and truly extreme vocals. It rages and seethes with malevolence and weirdness, an unholy combination of brutality and surrealism.
Highlights include the truly magnificent ‘Bursting with life’s true fruits’ which opens with a riff so warped it bends space and time, and ‘VVVVRMS’ which features at the start a stunning drum solo that lasts halfway through the songs four and half minute run time.
This album will not be for everybody, it requires thought and concentration to truly grasp its mysteries. For all the variety and musicianship on show it would have been nice to hear some variation in the vocals which do tend to sound a bit monotonous compared with the rest of the music.
For fans of cerebral Avant Garde death metal this album will be right up your street, a great and promising debut from an exciting new band, one that hints of cosmic horror and chaos to come.
