Review Summary: Echoes of the damned, clawing at the periphery of existence.
As a beast sprawling inside a subgenre that staunchly navigates within very specific pathways and takes pride in eschewing any form of experimentation, Teitanblood made an onslaught on the scene with 2009’s
Seven Chalices in a way that had to be experienced firsthand. There’s no more fitting title than war metal to pin on the shoulders of the band, yet their ambitious, cataclysmic blend of bestial black / death / battered noise was and still is characterised by exemplary uniqueness and has granted them well-deserved, reverential reputation. Marching with a series of remarkable albums of the highest caliber in metal forged by hellfire,
From the Visceral Abyss spawns the next cacophony that violently slashes its way out of the rotten womb and lays ecumenical carnage.
Being adept at crafting long-duration albums, the Spanish quartet’s new effort is no different, and rest assured, it’s no mere task going through such a prodigious work. Teitanblood’s rich musical tapestry is still inextricably bound to the archaic black / death metal principles, elevating them to layers of extremity that other bands only imagine as chimerical. Like a hammer to the ribs, the music on
From the Visceral Abyss is deliberate and merciless, with an abundance of scything riffs, wraithlike vocals, and intersections of distorted dark ambient samples that pulse and purge at the same time. You won’t get a chance to breathe once the entropic opener “Enter the Hypogeum” starts and sets the acrid tone of the album, exuding an ever-consuming malignance that seasoned freaks of the underground are attracted to like vultures to carcass.
Building upon a direction initiated with
The Baneful Choir in 2019, the band has, in a way, cleared out the impenetrable murkiness of their early works by presenting a more approachable sound. Fortunately, the vortex and mayhem of their compositions have not been reduced at all. In fact, this time they have moved quite closely to their 2014 - 2016 era of the blood-slicked
Death and the
Accursed Skin EP, which makes
From the Visceral Abyss as intense as Teitanblood always is, but also a fine starting point for getting to know them. If held at gunpoint, I would have preferred the thicker production that characterised their first two albums, but in the end, it may just be me not being able to recover from the shellshock of how otherworldly and inconceivably terrifying they sounded a decade ago. The record also benefits greatly from its immaculate flow, with one masterful transition after another that makes it almost impossible to realize when each track gives way to the next if one is not paying attention.
The most notable change of pace on
From the Visceral Abyss is the one-minute interlude “Sevenhundreddogsfromhell” in the middle of the album, and there’s just pure annihilation before and after. Tracks like “Sepulchral Carrion God”, “Strangling Visions” or the sensational “And Darkness Was All” showcase outstanding musicianship, and while I appreciated the more linear black metal structures in the self-titled track, the true highlight is the final, longest piece “Tomb Corpse Haruspex”. In its 15-minute length, Teitanblood takes all the time in the (under)world with an intimidating opening to build into an immense, blistering climax, and brings the record to an end in a horrific but grandiose manner, featuring an unsettling closure strongly reminiscent of the introduction in
Seven Chalices, potentially indicating the snake finally biting its own tail.
Carrying on its tradition of consistency, Teitanblood unleashes pandemonium in
From the Visceral Abyss, a skull-fracturing opus with a dominant aura that equates the sublime with the blasphemous. The band has long shown no remorse and no pity towards its craft and its audience, but this has served us well so far, and there’s no sign of things being any other way in the future either. This is one of the fiercest records you’ll listen to this year - wondrous and frantic in its entirety. What you condemn as chaos, we hold sacred as scripture.
