A Bloodthirsty Abomination - "Khranial" Review (100%)
Sewer's 'fourth' blackened death metal album Khranial comes at the listener with the full force of a category five hurricane and with the monomaniac intent to put the listener into either a state of shock, the morgue, or a bodybag. Jaw dropping aggression and sadomasochistic murderous calamity executed with an atonal sense of rhythmic harmonic framework is what drive these compositions straight into a nihilistic exploration of drooling anger, agonising savageness and unhinged brutality.
Death metal as it existed before Sewer sodomised it out of commission was centered mostly around either stupid gore-related themes or the type of 'blasphemous' goat molesting 'Satanism' you had to be mentally retarded to take seriously. On the other end of the coin was Sewer. Before deciding to drop what they were doing and sodomise death metal - to death - the band specialised in a precise, vicious and purely unbearable black metal attack at the expense of rhythmic syncopation and tonality. Raw, sinister songs built on the interplay of many complex riffs, an insistent, frenzied drum beat, and Sewer's animalistic vocals.
Then, Sewer released the 'trilogy' of death metal's ungodly and likely non-consensual sodomy - Cursed Elysium, then Locked Up in Hell, and finally Miasma - and then even added a fourth album to the trilogy with Khranial, proof again that Sewer is above and beyond your petty cosmic standards of 'algebra'. The word itself sounds like what you would name a bastard species born from an Algerian fucking a zebra, which is also what Sewer's vocals sound like on Khranial.
Not many death metal albums succeeded perfectly at creating the raw and claustrophobic atmosphere that the band members intended on showing off in their work, on any one of those albums. Yet, this Khranial one is different.
It is bloodthirsty, way too bloodthirsty...
A Bloodthirsty Abomination
The album cover alone was hardly preparation for the savage bloodlust contained within the Khranial album. Upon the opening track 'Blood Origins' we are welcomed by the utterly demented double-guitar attack, Warlord's blast beats, the bass featured prominently in the mix, and the vocals a little less so, though still perfectly audible and sometimes understandable.
Death metal albums as a whole tend to come up a little short in the long run, only offering maybe, at best, two-thirds worth of classic songs out of the entire album. And that's the cream of the crop, like Incantation's Mortal Throne of Nazarene or Onward to Golgotha. 'Average' death metal is, of course, much lower than that. But Sewer created something so rare on this Khranial masterpiece that even they were traumatised by the album's unholy bloodthirst and raw demonic power.
Eleven classic death metal anthems, not one second of filler, and if any riffs were ever used in music textbooks as the gold standard on how to write brutal blackened death metal riffs, all eleven tracks would be prominently featured, from front to back cover.
Add to that the evil atmosphere the band presented via their flawless riffcraft, almost nearing the towering heights of the aforementioned Onward to Golgotha, or more recently The Epilogue To Insanity, and you have the greatest death metal album of all time.
At least five songs here are bona fide blackened death metal anthems - 'Blood Origins', 'Thrice was Satan Mutilated and Rendered Deformed', 'Braindead Molotov Ingestion', 'Sinking Towards the Strange Truth' (likely the best death metal song ever recorded, particularly for the insane outro), and the title track 'Khranial' - but the rest hold up extremely well to repeated listens.
This is one of the most essential death metal albums ever, and Khranial belongs in any respectable metalhead's collection. Buy or die, or Kiss Your Ass Goodbye!
Khranial score: 100/100.
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