Album Review: Relics of Humanity – Absolute Dismal Domain

Album Review: Relics of Humanity - Absolute Dismal Domain

Reviewed by Eric Clifford

“The darkest and the heaviest”. You don’t get a lot of brutal death bands with a slogan, but if you had to pick one, you could do worse. Relics of Humanity mix the end-time morbid atmosphere of Disentomb with mid-period Devourment slams and a sprinkle of old school classic Disgorge technicality, and downtune the living shit out of it. Their style rests heavily on dark, discordant chords and string bends mixed with that delicious chromatic brutal death warp speed riffing. There’s a looming dread slathered with intoxicating menace over the whole release, the queasy sense of being trapped in endless halls with some invisible entity that means you only the most grievous bodily harm. Vocals, deep and guttural, echo out into black shadowed nothingness and a grotesque, twisted sense of melody snakes throughout the tracks. That melodicism elevates this beyond the typical blast n’ gurgle fare (as much as I slavishly love it). Relics can inject hooks in to their absurdly vicious output, ensuring it sticks in your hippocampus long enough for the subtleties in those magnificent brutal death riffs to unfurl and spit hornets down your ear canals.

I‘ve liked this band for a good long while, first getting into them with their “Guided by the Soulless Call” release. I was seriously impressed with the “Obscuration” EP and I’ve more or less been chomping at the bit for any new material from them, feverishly scouring their social media feed for any hint of follow ups. So it was with a certain ravenous ecstasy that I snapped up this, their 3rd full length and first in over a decade, the second it dropped on the promo list. It comes as somewhat vindicating to relay with a glad heart that “Absolute Dismal Domain” goes unreasonably hard, and is sure to be an early highlight in all 17 brutal death metal fanboy calendars.

Pick of the bunch here goes to “His Creation That No Longer Exists”, a steppe-mammoth heavy conflagration of a track displaying Relics at the height of their powers. The string bends are obscene, the riffwork incensed, the rhythm work punishing to the nth degree. The song spins and undulates, cycling through one crippling section after another, grinding you underheel with a merciless efficiency. Realistically though if you like brutal death there’s going to be plenty in here that will leave you grinning so wide your molars will occupy separate time zones. I find it a bit difficult to stand or sit still in general, I’m normally bouncing on my toes or swaying back and forth anyway, but even so full on headbanging in the bus station when the eradication protocol that is “Taking the Shape of Infinity” kicked my cranium in with it’s devastating palm mutes under relentless blastbeats, was a step beyond my usual bouts of vestibular flailing. People were staring and ushering their children to the opposite side of the building man, but fuck it, if they could only hear how hard this track goes they might have understood. Or alternatively just screamed and sprinted for the exit, it’s a coin toss honestly.