Review Summary: Sunny death metal.
Among death metal contemporaries, Impetuous Ritual would find themselves in strange company. You see their brand of punishing death metal is only emulated within a few choice acts, more notably of which is fellow Aussies, Portal (who share members) and steer away from flamboyant runs of melody or technical aggressive riffs. Impetuous Ritual are a wall of sound, of dissonance. It's very being is an affront to the norm while immersing, smothering a world of sinister noise and swirling translucent distortion. Yet, they are
very much death metal in essence, in energy and intensity. The band’s more beastly soundscapes leave a listener in a precarious state, balancing claustrophobic swathes of cavernous inaccessibility—contemporary avant garde be damned to the lowest and blackest of pits.
Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis simply continues where
Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence and
Blight Upon Martyred Sentience discordantly left off. “Sanguinary Abstraction” ebbs into being a slow building plod like a blight against serenity. Impetuous Ritual continues to blotch mess against an empty canvas, not unsimilar to a toddler stabbing a paintbrush into their hobby art.
How does that look? It’s beautiful, rough barks cutting clearly through the din. Wailing guitar solos dancing in the air. The feedback of “Rite of Impalement” glistens against the distortion while “Necromantic Esurience” ensures the
swarth and grind Impetuous Ritual designs around their brand.
Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis is uncompromisingly unsettling, but still manages to churn out a surprise or two under the guise of the band’s more traditional, one-dimensional aesthetic. The twelve-minute progeny catapulting a world of ongoing rhythms and atmospheric dives into the band’s best bookend to date. Slow, doom melodies creep into the mix, drawing out a sense of foreboding, throttling the atmosphere away from the chaotic wall to wall of extreme dissonance. This near drone is at odds with the rest of the album’s painstakingly curated avant death-isms and yet it’s the yin and yang that brings
Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis together—an eleventh-hour saving grace set in a field of bleakness.
At first glance, the closing “Metempsychosis” doesn’t fall far from the branches to which the rest of the album wholly grows. If
Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis is comparable to a tree, it’s without a doubt covered in bark, but it
bites too. Impetuous Ritual continues to dominate more extreme nuance, allocating lighter flourishes on melody in sparring, defining moments. That doesn’t change to more one-dimensional leanings that unnaturally sap out of the music’s more linear moments (to which there are quite a few). That said, and despite the album’s slightly longer tracks,
Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis doesn’t drag or bloat and is exactly what it needs to be: furious and unrelentingly chaotic. Impetuous Ritual returns to the blackest of pits once again.
