Released towards the rear of last year, Demonic Satanic the new album from Swedish black metallers Mordant just has to be looked at and recommended no matter the length of time since it’s unleashing. Fusing black, thrash, and death metal into one corrosively virulent proposition, the band’s sound and in turn album is a tempest of fearsome rock ‘n’ roll which welcomingly infests and devours the senses.
Formed in 1997, Mordant has released two previous albums in Momento Mori (2004) and Black Evil Master (2008), a trio of demos, and a split with Sabbat in 2013. Each has increasingly nurtured the band’s unique style of black metal fuelled pestilence now raising the cancerous infectiousness of Demonic Satanic out of the sole confines of its source genre. As suggested, the album is pure rock ‘n’ roll without losing any of the Swedish black/metal traits it has its seeds in.
Vengeance from the Dark is the album’s first trespass, the track swiftly luring ears with rhythmic bait and stabbing riffs before driving headlong into a scourge of raw rapacious riffs and toxic grooves. As the throat bleeding tones of vocalist Bitchfire scowl, the thrashier instincts of the band collude with melodic and sonic flirtation but are never allowed off the leash as the track confronts ears like a venomous celebratory waltz. It is a constantly enjoyable nag on the senses with hooks sharing character with old school rock ‘n’ roll, even at times rockabilly.
The excellent start continues as Devastating Storm… Evil Holocaust bounds in with its own incessancy of riffs and rapier like rhythms, the scything swings of drummer Necrophiliac managing to simultaneously bludgeon and be precise in their touch as the bass of Carnage growls with mercurial intent. As the intrusive assault of rhythm guitarist Soulmolester harries ears the grooves of Angelreaper wind themselves around the psyche, venom lining their every twist; masterful assets repeated in the album’s title track straight after. The track is as much psychobilly as it is extreme metal in many ways, that host of elements making up the Mordant sound diverse and expansive not only release by release to date but song by song upon Demonic Satanic. It is still blackened death metal at heart but as catchy as you could wish for; an epidemic of spiteful temptation.
Evil Impalers is another scourge easily taking limbs and appetite in its grip, its thrash sparked charge the drive for insidious suggestion and endeavour to seduce whilst courting the track’s bestial side before the Dals långed based quintet infest the Sabbat track Blacking Metal with their own creative curse. Both tracks leave nothing left to desire with the former pure incitement for pleasure, a potency tapped into by the hellacious outpouring of Desecration from Hell, a tempest of sonic poison also with an embrace of melodic adventure with persuasive toxins of its very own.
Through the pair of Infernal Curse of Evil and Screaming Souls, the senses are tormented and instincts aroused, the first as much a slab of salacious rock ‘n’ roll as it is emotional malignancy and its successor a web of injurious enterprise woven from varied strands of metal. Each leaves a greed for more with the former another peak in the album’s landscape.
Count Lucifer brings the album to a close, its tempest raw yet majestic and surrounded by a web of invasive imagination and magnetic craft. Again you can only describe the enmity as carnal rock ‘n’ roll and one hard to evade becoming enslaved by.
With thanks to Kunal at Transcending Obscurity who personally recommended the album, we may be late to it but have not missed out on something which may happily share its genre inspirations but is, as the Mordant sound, a fresh creative rancor to be in turn inspired by.
Demonic Satanic is out now through To The Death Records and available @ https://tothedeathrecords.bandcamp.com/album/demonic-satanic
https://www.facebook.com/mordantblackmetal
Pete RingMaster 03/03/2017
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