Review Summary: Darkness to vanquish, to rip asunder.
If you’re Asthâghul, (you know the guy that churns out an Esoctrilihum album roughly eleven months,) you probably haven’t slept in years. I mean there’s this one guy, by himself, releasing top shelf blackened death metal like clockwork. With ideas bubbling out of an over-filled cauldron, slops hitting the proverbial floor to be swept, mopped and reworked into something filthy a year from now. Asthâghul is seemingly
endless. Esoctrilihum is a beast unto itself and his newest offering to the demon god,
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh is up there amongst the year’s best albums—not just specific to metal, but across a wider musical scope.
Heavy praise.
But that’s just it.
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh is heavy, not just in design, but also in comparison to this project’s already prolific releases. Even comparatively so there are distinct, notable differences that separate the paths trodden to the climes of today. Of those divergences, most noticeably is the record’s overall length. At forty-one minutes
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh is Esoctrilihum’s shortest offering since 2018’s
Inhuma by fifteen minutes (with most of the band’s other albums exceeding the hour mark) encouraging a more succinct, less intimidating listen. It’s a welcome change for an act so well known for providing gargantuan soundscapes at a wall and
having everything stick. Similarly, the production values have also shifted; being less the wall of sound that both
Eternity Of Shaog and
Dy'th Requiem for the Serpent Telepath used to transfer their massive motifs from one end of the cosmic reaches to our humble plain. That doesn’t mean the newest of these three records is any less monolithic than the other, but
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh is decidedly more organically steelier, rawer and somehow more virulent because of it. Where Asthâghul’s demonic shouts and snarls were previously fighting for prominence, they now stand at the forefront of the fray, like a war-leader calling for battle.
The bite of “Spiritüs Flesh” is unmistakably Esocrtilihum. Riffs build into a frenzy of blast beats and razors while Asthâghul roars and screams over the top. There’s a demonical backdrop, laced with fury and pain as snarls transform into real screams, an audible protestation to the world we live in. “Thertrh” is visceral, even more so than the opener—but not without losing the demonic flair that’s brought Esoctrilihum on this journey. Razor-like riffs punch through “Thertrh” with an unrivalled tenacity and esoteric vibe. There’s something ritualistic about the use of riffs and underlying melody that bridges the intense metal aesthetic to Esoctrilihum’s more mystical edges. What’s more impressive is that this is still
just one guy just going through the motions Making extreme, inaccessible music that’s not only palatable, but completely digestible in this form.
The record’s latter half keeps well within the former’s pacings. “Scaricide” especially does a good job of dialling in the formula and somehow taking it up a notch without brick-walling a dense, layered soundscape. “Sydtg” and “Aath” close
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh in a ritualistic one-two punch unrelenting and unsettling. Esocrtilihum’s grasp on dissonance and furor have never been as pronounced until this record and while a new listener may gravitate towards
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh’s first half, Asthâghul has crafted a record that seeps vitality from start to finish, executed
almost perfectly. Just how “Aath” booknotes the new album is downright diabolical. A fierce transference to silence and the nothingness beyond.
It’s hard not to appreciate just how condensed
Consecration Of The Spiritüs Flesh is when directly compared to its predecessors. Not only does this improve on the balls-to-the-wall production values, but also the attention spans of listeners who may have found those other album’s runtime just a little too daunting. Esocrtilihum is now everything in the correct dosages, at the correct time with a broad scope in mind. Asthâghul is the true demon king of the metal underworld.
