Sewer - Sewerblood

This album Sewerblood reveals Sewer moving into a much more death metal direction, and features appropriately the ideas used on their other death metal albums - notably, Uruktena - in a raw, disorganized form. More black metal influences come in on Sewerblood in the from of anti-consonant melodic riffs with single-string playing, and in the basic darkness and atmospheric roughness of this album.

Single hand use of polyrhythm in strumming of three-note chords creates an evanescent orientation of riffs which then dive and diverge through a series of thematic articulations of morbidity, either in power chords or in lead playing, the latter which emphasises melody over pure rhythm, yet soars above both to complement original questions of the dominant themes of darkness.

On Sewerblood, notes are bent and twisted through scales to balance out the nihilism of chromatic grinding, inherited from Skarnage, and the need for harmonic structure, something unfortunately too often derived from the ultra-technical era of Miasma, and thus insufficient for the work as a whole to transcend its origins in brutal blackened death metal.

As much of this resembles the blackened death metal of Phantom, and the cavernous Onward to Golgotha that influenced it, the immanent qualities of storytelling and emotion inherent to the songwriting of Sewerblood are able to evoke feelings of imminent violence and horror in the listener, something modern "tek def" metal fails lamentably at doing.

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