MERRIMACK

Unbridled, untutored fury makes for good, scary, compelling black metal, as the rawest and most primitive bands of the genre have proved over and over again. But perhaps even more powerful is the band who wields a weighty sound with crushing, calculating precision, creating dynamic tension and labyrinthine song structures. It makes for an even more intense experience — using ever-more sophisticated and progressive methods to achieve the same barbaric, primal atmosphere of dread and evil, with memorable songcraft added on as a bonus.

It may piss off the "punk rock" black metal purist in the NATTEFROST longsleeve, but it's doubtful that French occultists MERRIMACK much care. On this, their third album of haughty, evocative black metal, they're willing to slow things down and let songs build organically to a frenzied finish ("Omniabsence"),or to drop in a CELTIC FROST "ooh!!" and a nice churning old-school riff into the middle of a track ("When the Stars Align"). In the same song, the rhythm builds up behind a slow, brooding, almost mournful riff and the tension escalates, almost without the listener noticing it, until the same riff has a blast beat behind it. And check out the thirteen-minute, edge-of-your-seat album closer "By Thy Grace", where a recorded sample of a Christian worship service — one of the few production adornments on "Grey Rigorism" — gives a pallor of creepy cultism to call-and-response religious convention before the song tears into a nerve-jangling riff that obliterates all discussion. This song alone has more peaks, valleys, and recurring themes than most extreme metal bands' entire careers!

All this is just a more ornate way of saying that MERRIMACK write damn good songs, adding creativity and and almost classical sense of compositional structure without straying from the conventions of guitar-bass-drums black metal. It helps, too, that they're strong players without being showoffy (check out Necrolith's drumming on "Cold Earth Mourning" for some impressive, perfectly-placed thundering fills). It all comes together to make the sort of band who don't always get their due, especially in the BM scene — relying on putting in the work and honing their craft over gimmicks and flash. Don't get me wrong — "Grey Rigorism" is, from start to finish, an impassive slab of brutal, flaying, utterly heavy blackened torment. The genius of MERRIMACK is that their fury is even more potent, and their impact greater, for having an iron-fisted control over their swirling chaos.