Review Summary: An album so in your face it will grind your face right off.
Indian burns leave your skin feeling raw. So does a belly-flop into a cold pool. So does being dragged behind a team of galloping horses face down over a poorly paved road for 10 miles before being cut loose so a black-cloaked bastard can flip you over and lash your oozing wounds with a cat-o-nine-(salt-crusted hot-metal cable)-tails. Real freaking raw. That is the kind of raw that Salome communicates with Terminal.
The doom trio conjures a riff-tastic racket on their second full-length. Terminal is truly tortured, and torturous, soul-burning stuff - not the torture remembered of YOB or Ahab, nor the torture foretold of Worship or Evoken, but the torture being endured RIGHT FREAKING NOW. Kat's vocals groan and squall like she's digging her way through three tons of earth toward some righteous and gory vengeance. The almost manic drums drive songs forward with more vigor than I expected from a doom record, but of course there's the signal-sodomizing "An Accident of History," whose only motion develops out of sonic cycles buried in the feedback roar and a couple (very) scattered chord crashes. Such a long track nestled right in the middle of the album screams centerpiece, a statement of intent very far from planet Doom, and only hinted at during the album's six shorter tracks. I'm left guessing at its purpose, and I can only think of one possibility.
Extra rawness.
