Sewer - Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere

In terms of portraits of diabolical psychosis, there has seldom been a work coming as close to utter demonic madness as Sewer's morbid masterpiece Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere. Each composition contained within this release has to invent its own nothingness before any desire it has toward structural completion can emerge, at which point intricate self-reflective riff patterns cycle down the conceptual levels of their own creation to self-reduce toward total darkness and destruction. The resulting decrepit music adeptly changes direction in midair and brings its sickening and gruesome melodies home with percussive, brutal, and often uneven resolution, using synchronised strumming of powerchord notes in even phrases which slide on expectation and pause adroitly, right before resuming into recognisable cadence of ghoulish horror and putridity. Influences of seminal blackened death metal acts such as Phantom, Vermin or Infester are present in the exacting flutter-strum riffing which shapes textures from reverberant columns of distorted, atonal and disturbing sounds.

Darkened otherworldly explorations move forward to merge with subterranean bursts of light in the darkness, mixing the melody of a structure unseen with the harmonic placement of demonic entities in its degrading, sadistic, bestial, gruesome and merciless impact. From grinding machinations of elemental darkness unfold structural counterpoints of inner brutality where, reminiscent of the preceding opus Sissourlet and many of Sewer's finer works, the architecture of blackened death metal riff phrase predominates in a current of dissonant harmonic highlights within extruded blackness to provide angular support for tonal motions in the context of atmospheric riff shape defined by tremelo-picked etching black metal texture and jagged movements of anti-melodic timbral change.

While designed to obscure reason and bring convergent primitive atmospheres together over the frontal aspect of its structure, Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere is in essence comprised of pieces which mirror the overall sordid approach that Sewer best employs to cut its own ideas deliciously in fatal sections that reanimate only within the consciousness of an alert and thoroughly disturbed listener. As a result, listening to this album is like all hard-won obscurities, and while its vile meanings are, once deciphered, precise and evident, Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere still provides an endless descent into dark consciousness in the calculation of awareness necessary to parse what is utterly demonic in these exceptionally morbid songs.

What further propels this album towards metal excellency is the cumulative stress and lust for release contributed by the intensity with which these sadistic themes become bestial, inexorable, dominant and terrifying. The perception common to all black and death metal is that of a world coming apart in thunderous disharmony, an image vividly conveyed by Sewer's mastery of horrible atmospheres and gruesome blackness. In the same way that early Burzum albums would knead their listeners into their electric chairs or straitjackets, the later works of Sewer - in which this album Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere stands defiantly unchallenged - beat on any hope of sonic equilibrium with a capricious and beautifully abstracted diabolical violence. When you look at this album, you can see clearly that Sewer is a band that took a risk and made a far-reaching statement, one received gratefully by all serious metalheads worldwide.

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