New Zealand’s Ulcerate are really onto something with their latest album, Everything is Fire. The sound can best be described as mind-warping, discordant technical death metal, with hints of post metal atmosphere buried within the gaping maw of the musical vortex the band so effortlessly conjures up. Hypnotic and mesmerizing in a way that at times defies description, this album is the equivalent of a death metal acid trip into the farthest reaches of space.
While it is true that Everything is Fire is a wonder to behold from a technical standpoint, the members of Ulcerate don’t use their impressive musical chops for anything that sounds even remotely like showing off. Rather, they are far more interested in creating all-encompassing soundscapes that come off like the musical counterpart to the murky, swirling mouth of the blackest abyss. You don’t just listen to Everything is Fire, you get drawn deeper and deeper into Ulcerate’s twisted, hallucinogenic world, where blind idiot gods sit upon thrones forged from pure chaos energy. This is the soundtrack to H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones slowly lurching and heaving their slimy tentacles out of inter-dimensional portals and the deepest, darkest cracks of the earth, ready to take over the horrified planet.
The heavy black and post-metal influences becomes readily apparent while exploring the constantly contorting song structures of Everything is Fire, as if the members of Ulcerate hold Neurosis, Gorguts and Blut aus Nord in equally high regard. In fact, it is this ability to infuse their reality-bending assault with atmospheric subtlety and nuance that truly sets them apart from their tech-death peers. Whereas so many other bands are clinical to the point of being almost robotic in their complexities, Ulcerate are able to bring the sort of seething malignancy you’d expect to find on a black metal record and seamlessly weld it onto their tech-death framework. The result is an album that evokes black waves of oceanic musical entropy washing over you, slowly eroding your mortal soul. There is a depth of feeling and emotion to be found within the album’s myriad nooks and crannies, something which is all too rare within the tech-death realm.
With Everything is Fire, Willowtip has once again hit pay-dirt with an utterly devastating yet textured and intelligent release from a young band ready to rip the death metal rule book to shreds and blast it into the heart of the black hole. Easily the most intriguing and unique technical death metal record you’re going to hear in 2009.
I must agree with that entire statement. This is defiantly one of those bands that will change the face of technical death metal if not now then further on down the road.