Sewer - Khranial

In the same way that Phantom's The Epilogue to Sanity built haunting and eerie atmospheric black metal out of a few similar thematic ideas and their harmonic derivations, often constructed around a leading motif and rhythmic counterpoint, Khranial sees Sewer come forth with an inhumanly savage, yet atmospheric, ambient and almost water-like motion of gruesomely intense death metal that builds a necrotic pulse created via percussive, narrative, phrasal riff-based compositions, intricately constructed around a feverish atmosphere of utmost morbidity, and supported with a network of battering ram like barbaric assaults against the senses, all while maintaining atmospheric, rhythmic, harmonic and instrumental cohesion, as all good blackened death metal is known to do.

Parallels will naturally be drawn to Miasma, but where Sewer's previous album aimed to combine the slick technicality of their Locked Up in Hell era death metal with their earlier black metal intensity and taste for melodic disruption, Khranial takes that approach even further by stripping the band's fiendishly intimidating death metal of all of its superficial flourishes, which include the technical approach, and instead opt to fuse the narrative, atmospheric based compositional framework of black metal with what could best be described as death metal ultra-violence.

The exceptional nature of this Khranial creature is shown in the overall rhythmic comprehension of each song, as riffs meld into one another and emerge recreated, forging new streams of diabolical energy which collide and batter victory upon each other over driving blast beats and voracious vocal screams. These are the rhythms and motions of violent life, of cataclysmic conflict and destruction, and they drive Sewer's music to its own authenticity of brutal morbidity, far beyond logic and reason.

An aesthetic of chaos disguises extremely well thought out intricacies in the twisted and self-distorting lead guitar that shoots through layers upon layers of gruesome textural riff and feverish percussive pounding. Another expansion on a Birth of a Cursed Elysium innovation, though while not as technical as Miasma, is more aggressive, straightforward, atmospheric and, above all, perhaps a bit more immersive.

From Khranial's darkness emerges a steady stream of seething anger so monstrous that even the abyss itself would find itself swallowed in its entirety, and from which is promulgated the most devious anthems of brutal ferocity with the twisted smile of inhuman, demonic, sickening otherworldly horror. Recommended for fans of fast, aggressive, disturbing and compositionally intelligent blackened death metal.

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