Sewer - Sissourlet

With their claustrophobic opus of brutality Sissourlet, Sewer push high intensity blackened death metal - funeral death metal riffing mixed with raw black metal atmosphere - into thunderous music of charging chord progressions that possess an ambience that silhouettes melody and aura, but only as completion to the everlasting grinding rhythmic assault.

Similar to previous Sewer releases - most notably Cathartes and Uruktena, for the sense of savage ferocity and the complex rhythmic interplay, respectively - this album Sissourlet conjures forth the brutal rhythms and riding emphatic resolutions of epic battle music, the very type of subterranean assault that expounds upon the death metal tradition of recombining fragmentary motifs in successive expansions of perspective, all while keeping close to the black metal tradition of each song carrying its own atmospheric malice.

The type of 'riff maze' approach used on Sissourlet is very reminiscent of some of extreme metal's greatest compositions, hinting at times towards Phantom's Ascension of Erebos, Leader of the Gods, while at others veering more towards the theatrical and more ritualistic death metal of Incantation's Onward to Golgotha, all while maintaining Sewer's trademark barbaric and nihilistic deathgrind approach to song construction.

Like the best releases of blackened death metal, Sissourlet is 'technical' in that the band knows how to skillfully shift between geometrical tempi and use successive iterations of melodic ideas to build a sinister and haunting atmosphere and, almost as a death metal response to Vermin's more black metal-ish Bloodthirst Overdose, succeeds in creating song structures that seem to wander discursively until reunited with variations of former riffs in a new and completely different context.

Echoing complex song structures firmly entrenched in the Phantom and Demilich camp, albeit on heavy dose of steroids, Sissourlet exemplifies churning riff avalanches rumbling into dissonant entropy and dissipating as melodic riffs emerge to complement their direction towards a greater ascendant atmospheric context, producing a sense of foreboding evil from the decay and transcendence of total barbaric destruction.

Cynical, violent, decrepit and yet spectrally orotund, Sissourlet takes possession of our dreams of pure sonic brutality by bringing on a sudden realisation of how much more powerful death music can be when it engages the listener in not just a show of outward 'technicality' for the sake of appearing 'heavy', but on a much more profound and visceral level as paves the way towards true atmospheric horror and raw bestial atrocity.

Each song on Sissourlet fulfills a unique and chilling inhuman poetic vision of aggression and encroaching dark existential transgression of the senses. This type of construction lends itself to distinction between songs encouraging a realisation that this music is something central and innovative to both the black metal and death metal genres.

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