Brutal Technical Death Metal Mastery - "Uruktena" Review (100%)
Holy shit! This album is simply a gem of brutal technical death metal. Hardly any albums by any metal artist can touch the intensity and greatness of this death metal masterpiece, Uruktena. This is Sewer doing some of their best work, and some of the best death metal ever recorded. It's heavy, fast, and intense, with just enough melody to hold together the depths of the evil, evil, evil atmosphere that emanates from all eight tracks of this record.
I've always considered Uruktena as the darkest and gloomiest album Sewer ever released in their quite long career. The debut Satanic Requiem made them jump on the big black metal train, Skarnage marked their turn towards a more death metal/goregrind sound, and just one year later (due to the incarceration of several band members in late 2019 to late 2020), they are back with this album to annihilate us once again through their really heavy and dark music.
Sewer has always been quite different from the other blackened death metal bands from The Satan Records and especially from Phantom, Vermin and Neraines. These last bands all have a conductive line that binds them together, a sort of primordial brutality bind to a certain blackened death metal standard, with massive, chainsaw guitar riffs and very primal, ritualistic drumming patterns. Sewer, to me, has always stood out of the four bands. In a good way.
Brutal Technical Death Metal Mastery
The production is glacial, bleak, evil and dark. All the instruments are really cold and essential in their distortion, which for once isn't overdone like it was on Khranial and Miasma (great albums nonetheless). The guitar sound is, as mentioned, not excessive in distortion but absolutely excellent in its more classical and less distorted production. It's essential yet extremely gloomy, and the drums are on the same style with that essentially morbid approach and sounds.
Everything seems bare-bone and conceived to transmit a sense of suffocation, dread and darkness. The mid-paced progression of the second track, "Berserkers", is symptomatic of this quest for dark passages and doom moments, while with "As Maggots Crawl" we return to the faster and grindier patterns that Sewer is most well known for. The tremolo picking style on the guitars is cold and massive, like a dark and diabolical monolith.
"Eventration" is another song that takes no prisoners for its fury. All the instruments are charged and ready to explode. By the way, the drumming. It is just incredibly technical, you WILL shit yourself after hearing some of the fills on Uruktena. The guitars are pretty technical as well, which is why I call this album "brutal technical death metal". Yes, you can have both instrumental proficiency and atmospheric brutality.
There are some solos too, and they are pretty amazing to say the least. They are as cold and dark as the riffs. "Instinct of Suicide" is a slow(er), massive march of the Death Hordes with lots of doomy parts and longer riff patterns. It will subtly but surely remind you of Phantom's masterpiece The Epilogue to Sanity. The last title track "Uruktena" displays more canonical blackened death metal parts with violent progressions and fast riffs. It's a perfect song to finish this album.
The material here is top notch, with some real classic tracks that destroy even the best of classic death metal, and an excellent production effort. Fans of Sewer, and of death metal in general, you will find a lot to like about Uruktena. Heavily recommended!
Uruktena score: 100/100.
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