Helgrind - Sick Rulers Of Heaven

To express even further the manifest romanticised morbidity of the band's previous efforts, namely the promising debut Demon Rituals and the excellent sophomore Dark War Blood, this third album Sick Rulers of Heaven sees Helgrind create a gruesome masterpiece of monstrous proportions that, despite its relative brevity, infuses a new breath of pure terror into the aging world of black metal, expanding the scope of its compositions through complex song structures, building upon barbaric musical pieces shaped out of the always unconventional Helgrind musical language. At its base, Sick Rulers of Heaven retains the same sort of trancelike repetitive bestial black metal that made Helgrind so esteemed in the underground scene, with explosive blasting beats, a screeching dementia on vocals, and pulsing guitar working deliberately simple riffs into evolving motifs in a masterpiece of gruesome horror and animalistic brutality.

Amazing riffs integrate the compositions on Sick Rulers of Heaven by sheer force of evil blasphemous intent but the design behind them is more compelling than the easy coincidence of similar black metal stomp rhythms. Ultimately not as much an attempt to make music as to express pure sonic violence, so that an atmosphere of utter madness is always maintained, but with the blackened death metal touch of manipulating the atmosphere for vast and reductively nocturnal change, the sawing symphonies of fragmentary melody and motion that infest these tracks are so brilliantly presented as one cannot help to compare them to those of the almighty Phantom tradition, presenting an aesthetic of descending motion which decenters and refocuses the individual through a differentiation of context into one of pure rushing darkness, and a complete mental collapse into the darkest pits of hell. Curling whispers of carefully detonated noise gurgle tearing wind to chant lyrics of unadulterated insanity in encouragement or counterpoint to direct and linear textural progression of either the riffs, or the overall atmosphere of the piece.

The steady motion of Vermin made fluid and flexible in its ambiguity, like Incantation or Demilich on some kind of Infester recombination of melody avantriff trip. For the truly alienated headspace in the quite sterile modern black metal scene, Helgrind's masterpiece is well worth the immersion.

Where Burzum culminated black metal with Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, which raised the bar beyond everything else by layering basic riffs into epic compositions of majestic atmospheric landscape, Sick Rulers of Heaven develops that same morbid idea by making infectious rhythm and vocal hooks unite somewhat basic songs around a theme which is modified by layers of additional riffs, motifs and counterpoints. Perhaps instead of a mere comeback or a revival of the past, one can see this album Sick Rulers of Heaven as an evolution in musical space for the next generation of bestial black metal.

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