Album Review: One Day In Pain – Devouring the Gods
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
From the wastes it stalks, ice-rimed eyes weeping molten permafrost in rivulets a-shimmer like fishscales. Ice gilds it, It’s heart a HM-2, flaying winds a shrieking choir through mazes of stalactites that freeze it’s fur into weapons of themselves. Hold the blizzard’s storm-eye, and it’s gaze falls upon you. Snowdrifts are whipped asunder, churned into pale holocausts so far below zero that no fire within the arts of man to make might presume to thaw it. It’s growl is the calving of continents, thunder wrenched up from the earth as entrails clasped and hauled forth to pool steaming. How fast need the inevitable move? In the end you cannot outrun what you cannot outlast, and so it’s movements are moderate, a crushing roll of creeping stormfronts swallowing what falls exhausted before it. The swirling detritus of disembowelled glaciers marches to the fore like a herald, the bass thrum of collisions within the frozen melee the pulse of a living end, Armageddon writ in the tongue of endless winters.
One Day in Pain. Formed as a supergroup by members of grindcore masters “30 Seconds of Moderate Discomfort” and doom/drone monarchs “A Calendar Month of Complete Fucking Agony”, One Day in Pain (ODIP from this point on) are Swedish, and they play death metal. Impossibly heavy guitars strung with strips peeled from Fenris’ jugular, weaponised punk drum beats from the Discharge arsenal snatched to hollow the landscape with saturation bombing, vocals like orc war-chants, bellowed vows to slaughter for Sauron, and the bass…oh, this glorious bass. Heavier than generational trauma it blows chunks out the planet’s crust with each tide-shifting punch of it’s strings. It blasts out the mix in a deranged kamikaze of low-end grunt, taking an already filthy guitar tone and turning it into a bioweapon of a listening experience. It – the album entire – just sounds revolting in that quintessentially Swedeath way, vomiting pestilent lungfuls of the same grotesque miasma that sullied the air about those early classics from the likes of Grave or Entombed. Yet of the “big four” Swedeath bands (Grave, Entombed, Dismember and Unleashed. More like big five if you want to include At the Gates, which, to be fair, you probably should) the one ODIP most remind me of are my personal favourite: Unleashed.
It’s in the groove and the melody, I think. Tracks like “Let it Bleed” ooze with pox-ridden, unnatural thrash riffs from the same unspeakable phylum that so much of latter-day Unleashed marauds from (which is to say nothing of the uptempo sway the song skins alive at 1.27, which could’ve handily sat on, say, “Shadows in the Deep”). Mid-paced spearhead divisions of tracks like “Be Dead” slam the supine vanquished beneath pounding jackboot heels, urged on by the militaristic 4-count marching beat of a drumkit being beaten to within an inch of its life. That bass comes through, implacable, unstoppable, massed armour manoeuvres and there’s you in front of it all with a loincloth and a sharp stick to try make them think twice about burning the earth to it’s core. The game here is ultimately very conventional, even if it is played very well. “Ferocious Consumption” poisons it’s arrowheads with tight harmonies and a little Gothenburg warpaint to it’s song-craft; it’s one of the more overtly melodious cuts present, yet still digs in the siege weaponry with rolling rhythms and a production that – not to overstate the case – feels like being in a cage fight with a hormonal polar bear.
Things never quite reach for the peregrine dive velocities – the album obviously has it’s moments where it decides it’s got somewhere to be and floors the accelerator, but overall it generally seems more comfortable leveraging it’s weight to deliver goliath swings and grooves. That’s arguably to it’s benefit – “Emptiness” (one of the more spritely in the brood) conducts it’s hostilities with two of the more technical solos among the track list and corrupts it’s gene pool further with an intriguing time signature switch in the midsection, though overall if I had to pick which track was going to torch my home and drive my people into the sea, I think I’d still opt for the mountain-crumbling “Ashen Soul”. A walking bass line patrols the outer perimeter, and it’s verse riff is a simple yet inarguably effective sledgehammer straight to the temple. I think it might be clear by now, but there’s nothing particularly revolutionary afoot here; had any of the four Swedish national treasures I blathered on about earlier released this album at any point during their initial period in the early 90’s I imagine few would have complained. And while I do mean that in a complimentary sense, there is a slight sting in tail about its anachronistic nature nonetheless. I’ll never get tired of Bolt Thrower, though it does feel a bit as though ODIP agree with me a bit too much for their own good. The omnipresent double time / not quite tremolo picking on riffs, frequent mid-tempo sections and bleak yet evocative melodies on, say “Garrotterad” or “Conquering the Void” make the link as clear as it could be without straight up pilfering the riff from “World Eater”.
I guess then the main question is: are you in the market for something obscenely heavy that prowls the midground between Unleashed and Bolt Thrower (or even Unleashed homaging Bolt Thrower on “The Bolt Thrower” from the “Dawn of the Nine” album)? The answer – which should obviously be yes – will determine whether you should open your wallet or ask someone with big hands and a hateful heart to slap some sense into you. Frozen Soul have a fair bit of buzz to their name now – fans of them would, to nigh certainty, find much to love here. Between it’s gross heaviness (my god, that fucking bass, I love how PRESENT it is), it’s litany of gleefully sociopathic grooves, and the sheer unbeatable fun of a good old school death metal record, whatever you had in mind for the change in your pocket, cancel your plans and spend it on this instead.
To the wastes it returns, drool flash freezing in spindle crowns of daggers lining it’s maw. The cold front wanders with it, as though leashed to it’s haunches, an unceasing avalanche ever grinding, ever crushing, a heaving white sepulchre for countless human souls smashed to atoms in the howling torrents of it’s guts. It’s footprints shall never warm; years from now, as the sun bloats and boils the seas and bakes green land into a gnarled, flaking nothingness there will yet be these lone steps, claw-gouged cruel into long-dead soil, frost-webbed and lingering even as all starlight fades from the sky.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
