ALBUM REVIEW: II – Opposition – Goath

GOATH, despite having only been an outfit for close to three years, have been rather prolific when it comes to recording. Already with a demo and a full length record (2017’s Luciferian Goath Ritual) under their belts, the latter being released on the excellent Van Records, they’ve managed to carve out a reputation for putting out brilliant blackened death metal and their equally good live shows in a fairly swift manner. Their second full length, II – Opposition, hones their sound and ups the musicianship significantly, resulting in an album that is far leaner, aggressive and intense than its predecessors.

The album’s opener, Revenge, kicks this record off with a bang; it bursts out of the speakers in a blaze of chainsaw riffing, tight, precise drumming and some seriously bestial vocals. It is a fairly ferocious affair, with only some sparse clean vocal passages towards its closing moments providing any relief from the overall onslaught of the bulk of the song. Where the first track had plenty of death metal motifs, Born of Fornication is a much more black metal centric offering, with shrill, tremolo picked leads, icy, shrieking vocals and a dirty, crusty and raw sound. With lots of great, mid-paced rhythm sections, broken up by impressive, acidic melodies, it’s an exercise in extremity that sticks in your head from the first listen.

The third, titular track on this record, Opposition, is a dense cut of visceral death metal, peppered with a little black metal for good measure. This song possesses some excellent rolling drums fills, brilliant, groove-laden guitar lines and a dark atmosphere that shrouds this track and makes it all the more compelling. Spanning just over seven minutes, this absolutely monolithic track doesn’t contain a solitary dull moment, drawing you in from its initial moments through to the final notes, which lead flawlessly into the next track, Source 0; by comparison, this is a short, sharp shock of a song, lasting little over two minutes, but slowly gathers momentum, with primal rhythms and a dirging, razor sharp guitar tone throughout, acting as a way to bridge the gap between Opposition and Purity of the Unseen, a thick, beefy piece of blackened death metal that couples robust guitar hooks with venom soaked gutturals and machine gun drumming. It’s a palpable track that really stands out from what’s been heard thus far, and it raises the musical bar significantly higher as the album enters its second half.

Myth of Forgiveness takes the musicianship on this album to its peak. With powerful frenetic drumming acting as the focal point, coupled with cacophonous yet melody tinged guitars and vicious vocals, it’s a track that features a variety of time changes, sliding from dense mid tempos to chaotic, charging passages, and manages to fit a lot of ideas into its four and a half minute span. It serves as one of the album’s highlights, which considering the quality of the rest of the album, really is a testament to how good it is. Enraged and Possessed is a lot more straight forward, with blistering speed and emotive, rage filled vocals marking the majority of this particular track. It’s a stunning piece of dissonant and vitriolic blackened death metal that brings to mind bands like BLASPHEMY, SABBATIC GOAT and REVENGE with its overall ferocity and unerring intensity.

The All Devouring Fire is a track that is characterised by a dense groovy guitar hook and thunderous drum patterns, which combined give this track an incredibly powerful feel. The vocals, acerbic and sonorous, add even more weight to the strength of this song, and make it seem large and expansive. There’s plenty of tight melodies thrown in amongst the discordance, which helps accentuate the overall darkness of this particular song. Throughout its span, it shifts from a mid-paced gallop to a funeral dirge, giving it plenty of variety, and keeping the listener enthralled to the end. The ninth and final song on the record, Luciferian Divine, with its heavy, chugging guitar motifs, pattering, primal drumming and truly eldritch vocal delivery helps to bring this album to a close in typically grim and ominous fashion. It’s an impenetrably oppressive and bleak piece of music, and provides some of the albums more ferocious performances. With its raw, grimy tone and top notch musicianship, it sounds great, and brings the album to an end on a very high note.

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, a spectacular album from start to finish from GOATH. If you love your extreme metal harsh, uncompromising and unflinchingly aggressive, this is definitely an album for you. But there is, in amongst the dark cacophony, plenty of melody and groove to satisfy fans of death and black metal in all its myriad forms. The musicianship on offer is nothing short of fantastic, and the rawer production quality allotted to this album suits the music down to the ground and really gives the music an extra edge that turns these songs from good ones to great ones. This is, in summary, pure extremity from start to finish, and well worth your attention.

Rating: 8/10

II – Opposition is out now via Van Records.

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