ULCERATE

Few bands in metal history have amassed a catalogue comparable to the one ULCERATE have spewed out over the last 20 years. New Zealand's premier purveyors of avant-garde, technical death metal, this brick-built power trio have become a living benchmark for excellence and willful obscurity in heavy music. As a result, expectations are sky high for the band's seventh full-length. If ULCERATE's last album, 2020's "Stare Into Death and Be Still", got a little lost in the chaos of a pandemic, "Cutting the Throat of God" seems certain to redress the balance and push its creators to the forefront of modern brutality, even if most mainstream listeners will be simultaneously confused and terrified by most of the music contained within. This, as ever, is not for the faint-hearted or those with a limited imagination. For everyone else, this is the synapse-throttling art-metal extravaganza we've been waiting for.

Although their sound is a gargantuan, fluid thing that has no respect for boundaries or limitations, ULCERATE still adhere proudly to the principles of left-field extreme metal. From the opening minutes of "To Flow Through Ashen Hearts" onwards, the Kiwis' trademark barrage is in full flow, with a production that outstrips all previous efforts and renders these deeply peculiar pieces of music in dazzling but down-hearted Technicolor. ULCERATE songs generally eschew traditional structure in favor of a free-flowing, perpetual mutation, but as the years have passed, they have also become lethally adept at generating atmosphere through dynamics and warping familiar elements into surreal new forms. "To Flow Through Ashen Hearts" has significant melodic content, in between bursts of wrenched-muscle mayhem, and a disarming sense of grace and poise that squeezes every last drop of melancholy from all that discord.

The pace quickens on "The Dawn Is Hollow", which hinges on a slow, steady build-up from an initial, blast-peppered churn, to passages of gothic post-punk desolation, and on to an increasingly overblown squall of IMMOLATION-like pomp and pugnacity. Previous albums have had their serene and out-there moments but ULCERATE have never sounded as confident in their own dynamic instincts as they do here. "Further Opening the Wounds" slams the same point home: this is magical stuff, the perfect combination of cerebral ambition and primal fury, and a death metal revelation like no other. Riffs morph and dissolve, turning into ever more grotesque forms, and vocalist/bassist Paul Kelland spits fire from his bully pulpit, buoyed by his band's lurching, licentious momentum. Once again, the reality that this heroically abominable noise is coming from a mere three people is difficult to accept but ULCERATE compose in such a way that the overall, disorientating impact of the whole thing overshadows any individual acts of technical prowess.

"Transfiguration In and Out of Worlds" encapsulates that transcending of the sum of these parts. It starts off like SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES through the looking glass, and incrementally develops into a brutally bleak and powerful wall of sound that threatens to suck the sun's light from the skies. Similarly, "Undying as an Apparition" dispenses with death metal's rudimentary riff collage and fills its nine immersive minutes with an ever-evolving deluge of askance melody and percussive hostility, with cold-hearted grandeur etched into every shimmering layer.

ULCERATE do not make music that conforms to anyone else's idea of how death metal should sound. In fact, it seems increasingly silly to describe the band in those terms. "Cutting the Throat of God" is a highly evolved, militantly creative and endlessly fascinating piece of work that merely confirms what sensible folk already know about this band. ULCERATE are astonishing.