Artist: Revenge
Label: Osmose Productions
Release: 2008
Aggression, pain, destruction and death are the words that best sum up the music and themes of Infiltration, Downfall, Death. It’s the latest release from Canadian Black metallers Revenge, who have been successfully stirring up spirits and the living world since 2000.
With their latest masterpiece, Revenge stay true to the filthy sound, so-so production and downright fantastically aggressive music that livens up even the gloomiest, most depressing day and keeps reminding us it could always be worse. Few records sound as intense and aggressive as Infiltration, Downfall, Death, especially with those truly crunchy, not-quite-distinct pre-distorted guitars that don’t sound clean even in the solos, of which there’s no shortage, since one pops up in every single one of the eight songs. The solos themselves come across as a mix of riffs from the early Death and Thrash metal bands that were getting hammered at the start of the ’90s. In other words, there’s no talking about melody, but you can point to the speed and a kind of rhythmic incoherence that makes the album relatively complex and tough to listen to.
The main trump card is definitely the vocals, which swing somewhere between screaming and even louder screaming, conjuring up a feeling of atonality. These vocal screeches are usually followed by a quick, sharp, short solo, while the heavy bass guitar is present throughout, at times a bit too much, since it drowns out the rhythm and lead guitar. Nothing very complex, but once you get immersed in the recording, you get pure, extreme Black metal, without any embellishments.
The word extreme gets closest to the essence of this album, which is extremist in every last detail. The vocals, drums and guitars are extreme, and rounded off together these elements create war hymns of decadence and decay, the kind the human ego brings when it manifests in a war zone. Militancy is present in every song and creates an unrepeatable feeling of massacre and slaughter, fairly common themes in the Black metal scene.
Technically speaking, the album doesn’t offer perfected, polished technique, nor the good production that many media outlets and labels put front and center for this release. The sound feels primal and at times recalls the related Noise genre, likewise known for its extreme execution of musical ideas. Maybe it’s precisely the slightly worse production that adds to the album’s originality, building intensity from song to song out of raw, unprocessed sounds.
Technically more demanding fans who swear by bands like Rhapsody of Fire will probably be let down by the weak production, while collectors and audiophiles who aren’t scared off by slightly rougher production will be more pleased. After all, what matters is the performance, not fixing wrongly played note sequences with software after they crop up during recording.
Line-up
James Read – drums, studio vocals
Pete Helmkamp – bass guitar
Track list
1.Death Heritage (Built Upon Sorrow) (04:30)
2.Blood Noose (Hog-tied like Swine) (03:40)
3.Sterilization (Procreation Denied) (04:41)
4.By Force (The Only Option) (04:24)
5.Barbed Anti (No Remorse) (04:55)
6.Survival (The Absolute Truth) (03:40)
7.Final Doctrine (Push Forward) (04:24)
8.Cleansing Siege (Take Them Down) (05:03)
