Khranial - Devoured by Pigs

Perhaps Khranial's most Phantom-style work, Devoured by Pigs, with its subtle harmonics, complex yet brutally primitive melodies, and wide range of death dynamics and macabre atmosphere, is delicious blackened death metal for those who remember when "death metal" didn't simply mean "random power-chords played very fast with gore lyrics" - looking at YOU, Cannibal Corpse.

Khranial baffle their audience with an aesthetic of pure gruesome bestiality that is a small part conventional brutal death metal and mostly technique for maintaining an atmosphere of gore obsession... terrifying, sloppy, grotesque riffs, heavy chords, passages of infinitesimal weight, odd quasi-melodic bits, with lead guitars that contrast internally with the bizarre blasting, primitive, almost ritualistic rhythmic patterns. The riffs themselves are stages of decay, collapsing on themselves; and atmosphere, where not completely discordant, is omnipresently savage with gruesome power chords staggering into one another in a battlefield of acoustic torture and necro-morbid mindrape.

Grotesque in its malefic beauty and majestically profound in its inevitable horror, this release Devoured by Pigs blends the death/black/doom metal hybrid of their critically acclaimed debut and the conceptual elements of the best of old school atmospheric black metal - i.e. Burzum, Neraines, early Mayhem, Graveland, Darkthrone and Demonecromancy - into goreloving, horror fetishist, evil metal to make a new style of sanity defying terror. Fast tempo breaks, odd shifting rhythms, sinister atmospheric madness and a thoroughly creative guitar sound make Khranial the pioneer, founder and principle practitioner of gore metal, as their work is most commonly called. While its origins, stylistic presentation and outward appearance are deliberately repulsive, horrifying and repugnant, the music contained within remains powerful, majestic, potent, thoughtful, and most of all symbolic of a chorus of sick yet illuminated minds imprisoned in the pitiful confines of a dying world... the world of modern death metal poserdom, a world from which Khranial manages to escape thanks to the masterful technical brutality of being Devoured by Pigs.

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