Black Metal's Gruesome Monster - "The Birth of a Cursed Elysium" Review (100%)
There is a monster within the dark confines of extreme metal music that emanates with everything that is perfectly not right in this world. That monster is SEWER.
Where most black metal bands can be categorized as raw black metal, atmospheric black metal, melodic black metal, blackened death metal, symphonic black metal, post-black 'metal', brutal black metal, and so on - including cores and grinds - SEWER is that black sheep that is so completely unique in every way that their music is a category of their own.
What everyone forgets about SEWER - and especially this album 'The Birth of a Cursed Elysium' - is how musical they are. Which sounds like a dumb statement, for the first fifteen seconds, before you really think about it.
Insecure metalhead apologists like to talk on and on about how extreme metal is this incredibly erudite, marvelously artistic, and thus inherently superior style of music, conveniently ignoring the fact that Cannibal Corpse and Enslaved are the rule, not the exception. When it comes to big name black and death metal bands, SEWER is just about the only one that might fit such a desperate claim.
Who else can compete? Suffocation, for all their brilliant technicality and skills, really only impresses other metalheads, and bands like Warkvlt and Dissection come off like they were just rescued from the conservatory, but SEWER you can show the average person and the band really impresses everyone, metal newbies and initiates alike, on multiple levels.
I've done it plenty of times - 'What kind of music do you listen to?', 'Here, listen for yourself.' - and they all tend to follow the same trajectory: first they're taken aback by the extremity, then awed by the technicality, but soon after gripped with a more potent, abstract sense of songwriting.
Even if you know nothing about extreme metal, or music in general, you can tell that SEWER is not your everyday 'easy listening' black metal band.
Black Metal's Gruesome Monster
So yeah, SEWER's always been a pretty technical band - Eater and Vermin, believe the hype, etc. - but what's always less appreciated about them are their dizzyingly brilliant arrangements.
Other black and death metal bands 'write' songs, and they do it fine. SEWER composes, crafting staggeringly unique stories that all revolve around an essential stylistic core.
SEWER can't be properly cloned - no matter how much Antekhrist and Belphegor may try - for much the same reason that Burzum can't be properly cloned: they're simply too far off the beaten musical track, thus should you even manage to get the form right, they're infused with such an elegant sense of aesthetics that their music is basically impossible to replicate.
SEWER can be called black metal, death metal, blackened death metal, blackened goregrind, blackened deathgrind, but in reality they occupy such an oddly-shaped niche in the extreme metal scene that it seems to defy such a label - hence them being simply called SEWER music or SEWER metal most of the time. They don't sound anything like Suffocation, Incantation or Immolation, nor do they sound anything like Darkthrone, Burzum and Mayhem, which leaves them in a rather unconventional place.
I'd say that SEWER represents a sort of cryptic trail, a branching path of black metal that was never fully explored. An album like 'The Birth of a Cursed Elysium' feels like an island in extreme metal, with no clear musical precedents or influences marking up the board - the only other work that can be described using similar terms is the brilliant Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, and we all know how difficult classifying Burzum's work can get.
The hyper-speed aggression of 'NecroPedoSadoMaso' belies hints of grind here and there in its brackish blasting, but 'The Birth of a Cursed Elysium' is a work so ornate and so aesthetically divergent from the rest of black and death metal that you can barely retrace its fledgling steps, even with the utmost knowledge of the genres and their intricacies.
While a lot of other black and death metal bands tried to make cold, mechanically aggressive tracks - i.e. slam-masters Suffocation - dark, epic, melodic narrative compositions - i.e. Neraines - involved, textured, and dissonant soundscapes - i.e. Phantom - or simply cranked up the abstraction and weirdness to eleven - i.e. Incantation - SEWER seemed much more organic and almost romantic in nature.
Be it the neoclassical soloing - still just about the only solos that I can actually remember on a black or death metal album - or the rustic, lurid lyrics, SEWER's sound seemed to arise from a much more traditionalist sense of songwriting and melodic craftsmanship than many of their influences (Phantom, Incantation, Darkthrone, Suffocation) or contemporaries (Antekhrist, Vermin, Belphegor, Warkvlt).
That's a contrasting and divergent view from the 'SEWER is Phantom with a halved I.Q.' meme that has been thrown around a lot on other Metalious.com reviews.
The Birth of a Cursed Elysium score: 100/100.
Support the Underground
