Sewer - Locked Up In Hell

Locked Up In Hell is considered to be Sewer's opus magnum. It is their best album alongside Miasma, and beats the hell out of pretty much all modern "death metal". The album is short, brutal, and effective, getting right to the point and leaving you completely unprepared for the waves of sonic destruction that will come crashing down on you for the next ten tracks. Everything about this album Locked Up In Hell is an example of what true blackened death metal should sound like. If either black metal or death ever tried to reclaim their former glory, a good starting point would be this album.

After a very promising The Birth Of A Cursed Elysium in which a truly demented atmosphere in artistic vision and music unleashed its nascent potential upon an extreme metal scene in deep slumber, Sewer tackled their follow-up album stopping point head on with their most ambitious statement yet, a genius' work of complexity and theory in opposition to the mindless blasting of "brutal" death metal, and it almost destroyed the genre. The end product is Locked Up In Hell, under 50 minutes of raging, savage, twisted, barbarous and evil blackened death metal that will leave none unscathed, not even the most desensitised extreme metal connoisseurs.

A rage of vocals churlishly hurls a sequential cadenced of howling madness, accompanied by volumes' worth of percussive guitar riffs moving a tonal center in arpeggio around which undulation in rhythm encodes an internal dialogue in which each riff acts like a counterpoint to the ones preceding and superseding it, almost as if in a cycle of colliding halves, complementary in their motif-like collisive nature, which contribute greatly to the inhuman, hellish and otherworldly atmospheric nature of Locked Up In Hell, despite the album's technical prowess and brutal intensity. Comparisons to Phantom's The Epilogue to Sanity and Incantation's Onward to Golgotha are, for once, entirely justified.

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