Album Review: Thætas – The Irredeemable Age
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Thætas made waves a bit back in the thoroughly diseased crevices of the musical landscape that I scuttle over with their debut “Shrines to Absurdity”. Boasting a wiry, discordant strain of death metal that seemed to squelch it’s way from the same unconventional viral culture as Dead And Dripping or Vulnificus, they bored a pus-slick hole in the brutal death landscape and began to feed, burrowing maggot tunnels through the rot, feeding, nurturing, and finally oozing free a second fleshy, tumorous larval clutch. This new brood they call “The Irredeemable Age”, and given the prowess of it’s elder brother it has much to measure up to. Are it’s misshapen, sclerotized jaws up to the task of mulching the competition too?
Yeah. Yeah they are. This is fucking killer, no ifs, buts, or any other accompanying implications of ambiguity. Thætas are lethal and angular as mantis limbs, their thorny exoskeleton a mosaic of a thousand toxic spines. Rhythms undulate and twist, lead lines swarm forth like Malmsteen got mixed up and instead of cornflakes ate a bowl of crack rocks, atonal slams shunt and jostle under the nervous ambience of spacey chords, vocals belch half-digested flesh stench over a mix ripe with accumulating composition. More bite-size than the expansive compositions of Dead And Dripping (if no less dangerous for it) Thaetas are fast proving alpha wolves of this avante-garde corner of brutal music as a whole.
Where to start… how about the Malignancy coded thrash of “Summers of Hate”? Unsettling pinch harmonics and sudden time signature shifts punctuating a radioactive graveyard of leering discordant chords and sickly melodic inflections. Or maybe “Daytime Lantern”, with it’s jarring acoustic stings to counterpoint the cresting waves of it’s percussion, ugly palm mute sequences crunching into place like broken ribs flash-fused rigid in a fingersnap. It’s groovy in an unkind way, lounge music for Anubis’ antechambers. There’s a nervous tension to their sound, as though you’re always waiting for a precipice that never quite arrives, and forces you to keep the edge of your seat warm for it’s whole runtime. If not as intense as that last Nithing album (no shame there, that thing is a masterpiece) it certainly shares some other of it’s attributes – the lurching stress and unease of it mostly. But where Nithing felt as though you were being torn into red, seeping ribbons in a meat grinder, Thætas instead wield the dread of dangling you above it, safety guaranteed only by the powers of a fraying string knotted about the loosest of your teeth.
“Digital Locusts” sounds like a spider’s egg sac erupting above the fretboard, thousands of arachnid footfalls painting the soundscape with unpredictable sweeps and jittering rhythmic spurts. It also forms as good a point as any to talk about the bass, given the prominence given to it at 3.22, as it perambulates through bad acid trip chords and a frenetic solo. It’s the pop of overextended limbs, kneecaps fired out of place, elbow joints bent back, back, back ‘til all at once the arm snaps into a flopping sack of useless meat. It’s always good to hear bass, especially on technically demanding albums that allow the musicians’ skills to shine as much as their compatriots do. Wall to wall, this album is saturated, in among the mouldering viscera, with excellent musicianship, with more chops than millipede karate.
I’d like to think that somewhere in the pretentious, overwritten mess you’ve just sat through that it becomes clear that I liked this album, but in case it needs saying in plain English, I really like this album. It’s clambering insectoid offerings are proof positive of an appallingly talented band making good on the promise shown on their – already impressive – debut. I hope that the band stick around, because seeing how easily they’ve vaulted the dreaded sophomore slump, the dubious honour of brutal death greatness could well lie in store for these remarkably disturbed individuals.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
