Extreme metal works well within the EP format. After all, some of the best releases in heavy metal history have barely scraped the half hour mark (lest we forget, Slayer’s immortal Reign in Blood screamed by in a scant 29 minutes) but sometimes a 7” just isn’t enough to satiate a listener’s thirst for the raw stuff. When musicians strive to create the most abrasive, alienating sounds possible, shorter formats just make sense. The ornery subsect of black/death metal can be especially taxing on even the most diehard eardrums, which is why releases that clock in on the shorter side inevitably rise to dominance. It’s one of the oldest tenets in show business: leave ‘em wanting more.
Louisiana newcomers Abysmal Lord definitely follow the “less is more” doctrine, and perhaps surprisingly, their latest release shows that they take a few other cues from Slayer, too. Storms of Unholy Black Mass is a five-song hellride that just exceeds twenty-six minutes in length and takes heavy cues from war metal godfathers Blasphemy and Impurity while channeling the newer, more cerebral school of occult death metal. The former’s sunglasses-at-night aesthetic is in full force, which is just as well; it gets sunny down in New Orleans, and most of the band originally hails from Alabama, having cut their teeth in the similarly chaotic Grave Ritual. The EP marks their debut following a 2013 rehearsal demo; the lion’s share of Storms of Unholy Black Mass is culled from that demo, but while that statement may lead one to expect an uptick in complexity or recording quality from the embryonic versions, rest assured that the earlier versions’ primal abrasiveness has been retained.
Abysmal Lord is not the kind of band that would benefit from a more polished approach. Rather, their confrontational style depends on the muddy, lightless effect created by the a stripped-down production job and untold layers of distortion and reverb to achieve its vision. “Terrorist Dawn (Introwehrmacht)” starts off so quietly that one’s instinct is to crank the speakers up, but try to resist the temptation: twenty seconds in, the volume leaps up into an absolute roar, establishing a violent precedent for what’s to come. The aptly titled “Gnashing of Teeth” is a savage affair, as vocalist M.C. garrots his vocal chords into deep inhuman growls and douses the whole pulpy mess in Ross Bay reverb while bashing away at his guitar, backed by understated drums and a throbbing bassline that simmers just below the surface.
The riffs often veer towards workmanlike and wouldn’t leave much to write home about if M.C. didn’t spend time coaxing wild, howling leads from his fretboard like a young and hungry Kerry King. The doomy “Angels of Persecution” dials the tempo back and bogs it down in a thick river of sludge, made all the more foul by those deranged vocals and the fluttering background blasts. Its seven-minute stretch offers a welcome respite from the non-stop onslaught the rest of the album launches, and even gets into an unexpected bout of black metal replete with sharp tremolo. “Storms View” is a weaponized, Slayerized, and pressurized black/death burst with a satisfyingly groovy second half, and the fast and thrashy death metal ripper “Revelation” ties it all together with a near-homage to early Morbid Angel, ghouls and all.
The album whips by in a blinding flash, and despite how well that brevity works in its favor, Abysmal Lord could’ve stood to tack on another song or two, especially if it had given them more room to explore those doomier inclinations. Luckily, there's more than enough time to flip the record over again before their full-length drops.
