A new malevolent power is rising in the world of extreme music! Ritual Abuse Hysteria is a newly formed extreme music label located in the Bible Belt of the United States that looks to promote blasphemous and vicious up and coming acts.
The label’s debut compilation release, “Le Satanisme et la Magie,” features six sinister sounding bands that all share a passion for spreading darkness through extreme metal music. I find it rather amazing that this label was able to bring together such fearsome sounding acts. It goes to show you the hard work and determination from people involved in the underground metal community who have done a tremendous job promoting talented up and coming artists. I’ve never heard of any of these bands before, but after listening to this entire compilation, I really look forward to what they have to offer in the future.
Each band contributed two songs to the compilation, which I thought was a great way to give listeners a little sample of what they artists have to offer in terms of extreme musical creativity. Glyph is the first band I want to talk about especially since they begin the compilation off with a killer song called, “Of the Clock Tower.” The track reminded me a lot of Summoning’s first album, “Lugburz,” and contains a very haunting atmosphere. There are plenty of intense sounding black metal riff structures as well as some blistering drum parts. The band’s second track, “Light Shall Become Shadow,” is also very impressive and once again establishes this cold and grim sounding atmospheric landscape full of raw sounding black metal.
Maw was another band that conveyed a very raw and merciless sounding black metal assault. I liked how Maw captured the dark essence of black metal even though some might argue that this is nothing new to the world of black metal music. The two tracks they provided, “Down in the Abyss” and “Them Worming Ones,” are still very solid cuts of nightmarish sounding black metal. Sometimes you need to look past the whole originality complaint and just appreciate the band’s effort when putting together an evil sounding piece of music.
Reproach was definitely the band that deviated from the typical raw and harsh sounding black metal style and went for a more abrasive blackened death approach. I really liked Reproach’s two tracks, “The Bones of Heathens” and “Stone Upon Stone, Foe Upon Foe,” which I thought vividly stood out and gave this band a unique identity. The band’s vocalist is an utter demonic sounding force and perfectly complimented the savage instrumental compositions that were featured on both songs.
The Bleak definitely takes home the award for most avant-garde and unconventional sounding black metal band on this compilation. Talk about really pulling listeners into a void of pure chaos and mind altering extreme sounding evil! “Writhing Over the Clouds,” was an aural assault of distorted devastation that was completely out of the ordinary, but I sure respect the hell out of this group for trying something a bit different.
If you want corpse grinding riffs and graveyard defiling blast beats then Skorbvster is your band. Their song, “Benektelig,” was a ghastly sounding piece of black metal and the vocal delivery was utterly unholy sounding. Play that song inside a church and watch the walls begin to crumble at the sounds of this band’s monstrous sounding presentation!
Last band to talk about is Thumos, a band that took be by surprise because on their two tracks there were no vocals. The band provided two pieces of doomy sounding black metal riffs that also seem to lay down strong sounding skull crushing rhythms. I consider their songs to be sort of rough drafts and would like to hear them build off what I thought was a solid foundation.
I believe that all six bands featured on this compilation are very talented and demonstrated certain qualities that I tend to enjoy when pertaining to extreme metal music. Ritual Abuse Hysteria did a great job putting this together in an attempt to bring awareness to these new artists. I hope this is the first of many releases from the label and I wish to see the label putting out full-length releases from these bands as well.
Link to the compilation below:
https://ritualabusehysteria.bandcamp.com/releases
Always enjoy reading your reviews.
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