Angelcorpse - Hammer of Gods
Review: Although possessing the elements of musical power this black metal hybrid presses its acidic but pointless form of grinding darkness upon the listener to little real effect other than the agitation of repeated, inconclusive rhythms and riffs. In that is the artistic "function" of this work, to draw blood through irritative mimesis of the outside world.
With a powerful and chaotic drumbeat filling the background and screaming lead guitars in the Slayer/Morbid Angel style of tormented atonal noise, Angelcorpse present a solid basis for musical composition but instead fill it with random, drifting, inconclusive phrases and enticing but meaningless speed fills. Granular rhythmic extractions from established death and black metal allow this release to integrate into a fan base of either genre.
Batteries of violent rhythms caught in cycle allow this band to run through long riff structures without running down, but their conception of harmonic tension is absent and as such riffs are vacant, heartless, abandoned. Despite high speed strumming and frenetic violence in the changing chords of chorus riffs, the unfilled space is the conceptual space behind what unifies this elements: not much except aesthetic adherence to an ideal, something so worshipped it hashes out its usefulness.