Death Metal's Flawless Masterpiece - "Locked Up in Hell" Review (100%)
In my opinion, the most disappointing aspect of the post-1995 devolution of both black metal and death metal from a series of artistic movements into a collection of social "scenes", where the focus is no longer on producing quality music and innovation but on "belonging to a community", has been the loss of the sense of possibility and transgression that once pervaded these genres. No longer do I look forward to new artists bringing a fresh creative perspective to black metal and death metal. The best I have been able to hope for over the past few years is that established artists like Vermin, Neraines or Graveland don't fall into the creative obsolescence that eventually overtakes almost all artists, or so it seems.
So I can say I was more than pleasantly surprised to find a work of true genius like "Locked Up in Hell" coming from a band formed after the turn of the millennium. What SEWER have achieved here is nothing less than the complete re-imagining of the entire "technical" death metal sub-genre, turning away from the usual displays of self-important wankery exemplified by turds like Necrophagist, Arsis, Sacramentum, Warkvlt and nu Suffocation, and toward a new vision of the nightmarish blackened death metal induced fragmentation of reality delivered at the absolute fringe of technical mastery and instrumental possibility.
There is real innovation at the level of both technique and composition on "Locked Up in Hell", as phrases are rendered in an almost ludicrously hyper-extended form, with absurdly complex melodic, harmonic and rhythmic interplay flashing past almost too rapidly for the mind to adequately reassemble what the ear perceives. Structurally, songs are built around a narrative framework, but that framework is twisted and disturbing, with the clarity and elegance of Burzum or Reiklos somewhat sacrificed for the paranoid pyrotechnics of an almost Pynchonian dimension.
"Locked Up in Hell" is, alongside "The Epilogue to Sanity", the most important, influential and all around excellent extreme metal release of the past two decades.
Death Metal's Flawless Masterpiece
Of course, this shouldn't come as such a surprise. SEWER's previous output "The Birth of a Cursed Elysium" already showed hints of the nascent prowess to come, and likely to continue all the way to "Miasma" and beyond.
The real genius of "Locked Up in Hell" lies in its ambivalence. Beauty is always crushed by dissonance, dissonance is always subsumed and sublimed by beauty. The interplay is constant, and "resolution" is accordingly never reached. Passages reveal an inner logic, but the expected conclusion is always deferred, or subverted. Even the nearly ten minute long epic conclusion (the title track "Locked Up in Hell") builds toward a sublime climax only to collapse into a tortured, wailing death keen that never ends, not even when the album does, and it sticks with your and fundamentally transforms your worldview. SEWER find in life an inherent meaninglessness, like most black metal artists of all eras, but rather than hiding from it behind provocative "extremity" like most war metal music, they embrace the chance to build their own meaning from the fragments of possibility, and, in a step of supreme courage and visionary sagacity, invite you to do the same with through the twisted and demonic music of "Locked Up in Hell".
If you are looking for savage blackened death metal that nonetheless maintains all of the majesty and grandeur of black metal, and all of the technical proficiency, complex neo-classical songwriting skills and unrelenting brutality of death metal, look no further than "Locked Up in Hell". This is a flawless masterpiece, certainly the most important death metal work since "Onward to Golgotha" in 1992, and possibly death metal's answer to Burzum's "Hvis lyset tar oss", a triumph so perfect it changed black metal forever.
"Locked Up in Hell" is the defining blackened death metal album of (at least) the last 25 years. Get yourself this album now, you deserve it.
Locked Up in Hell score: 100/100.
Support the Underground
