Album Review: The Berzerker – The Reawakening
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
The Berzerker are less a band and more an auditory hit of methamphetamines straight to the bloodstream. Through forbidden genetic science, they splice outrageously fast gabba techno into a deathgrind template resulting in something halfway between music and an aerobic firing squad. If their debut self titled release was feral but uneven, they made good on their potential with their appalling violent “Animosity” album by mixing the catchiness of the “World of Lies” release into the uncut venom of it’s older brother “Dissimulate”. “Animosity” is, to my ear at least, the high water mark of the band’s discography. But they weren’t done shredding our ears yet; obvious influence from death metal exists across the full spectrum of the ir back catalogue – including a cover of Carcass’ ultra-classic “Corporeal Jigsore Quandry” on “Dissimulate” – but they’d never yet sprinted all the way down the left hand path and done a full true blooded death metal release. And that was when, all the way back in 2008, they dropped “The Reawakening” on us.
“The Reawakening” is lethal; spat from Hell’s aviary, something of smoking pinions and flame lacework snaking about it’s beak. Realising that you can’t spell “death metal” without EDM, the band weave the grimiest warp speed dance beats into tracks like “The Deception”, hypersonic breakbeats forming the gunpowder charge to blast nimble flocks of Caltrop riffs at you. They’ve long had a sense of rancorous melody to them, and it’s no different here – a lot of these riffs wind a cacodemonic tunefulness into the cyclone that grants an insane catchiness to it, “Caught in the Crossfire” coming across as a mad cocktail of Terrorizer grind and thrash propellant. “Evolution of Aggression” leers at you with ugly grooves before lashing out with the pinpoint scalpel strikes that characterize it’s deceptively technical riffwork.
If “Animosity” felt like being torn apart by chimpanzees, “The Reawakening” feels like being dropped into the middle of a mass knife fight – less blunt trauma and more holding your jaw in place because a slash you barely saw opened your face from ear to ear. Maybe it’s just me slipping into picky semantics, but a word like “vicious” seems to suit it more than one like “brutal”. The texture of it feels sharper, more edged, more inclined to dislimb through incisions than brute force. The band are laser precise, and while the distorted bass drum is ever present in accordance with the will of the lord It has been rolled back a touch – a bit less the oppressive force it was on dissimulate or animosity. It’s joined by highest tuned pingiest snare the band have deployed, and one that’s likely to be something of an acquired taste even for grind fans. The result is an album that seems to prioritise a rapier’s precision agility over a zweihander’s broad reaving.
I feel that previous albums sometimes suffer for the band dabbling with soundscapes outside their core identity of an electronics-inspired deathgrind outfit (the interminable doom track “Farewell” that caps the otherwise excellent “World of Lies” album or the trio of industrial noise tracks that close out their debut for example). Here, though, then The Berzerker have ruthlessly amputated any incongruous vestigial limbs. With the exception of a few weird seconds of dead silence at the end of “Spare Parts”, the band waste neither your time nor their own, focused and inexorable until the cyber-tribal beat at the end of “An Unforgotten Force” finally lets go of your throat.
If you forced the most hateful drum n’ bass DJs that ever lived to do nothing but listen to At The Gates records for ten years, you might get something like this. “The Reawakening” is ravenous, faster than a scalded whippet and about as pissed off too. Nary a second of filler besmirches a runtime wholly devoted to the evisceration of your eardrums, and if you’ve not subjected yourself to the psychopathic serenading of this band yet, then let this be fair warning to strap in and brace for impact.
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