ALBUM REVIEW: Psychonolatry – Electrocution

Returning triumphantly from death metal purgatory after a five year wait for new music, Italian veterans ELECTROCUTION are hardly the type of band to invite you for coffee and a quiet catch-up. Instead, they charge out of the traps like a gang of deranged demons on new record Psychonolatry, taking a mere matter of seconds to lay down the blueprint for the ear-blistering battery that’s about to take place.

Kicking things off with title track Psychonolatry, the Bologna-based quintet expertly combine punishing drum passages, searing riffs and skull-shattering vocals to create a noise worthy of completely levelling small mountains. Hallucinatory Breed ups the ante even further, ripping through the speakers like Godzilla’s own personal hurricane.

This formula is followed on almost every track on the album to a similar level of success, as ELECTROCUTION never stray too far from the sound that fans have come to know and love over the past few decades. As you may expect there’s nothing particularly inventive or boundary-pushing here, but for a band almost 30 years into their career it’s perhaps enough to simply be presented with slab after slab of hard-hitting, destructive metal.

That said, there are still flashes of ingenuity and creativity that occasionally surface – the more technical guitar sections on Warped; some sublime guest vocals from THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER‘s Trevor Strnad on Misanthropic Carnage. These deviations from the aural narrative are just frequent enough to keep the record interesting, however the fact that these moments are among the strongest points on the album does potentially make you question the desire to stick to the more traditional death metal sound for the majority of the run time.

Although this is the main criticism of the record it’s certainly not a hill you’d choose to die on, as the sheer straight ahead, pummelling quality of the likes of Malum Intra Nos Est and Devine Retribution (complete with guest solo from the ridiculously talented Brandon Ellis) goes a long way to placing this towards the upper echelons of 2019’s best releases so far.

As proceedings begin to draw to a close, ELECTROCUTION seem hell-bent on refusing to release you from their murderous grip, once again battering you with everything they have on Bologna and the re-recorded, sledgehammer to the teeth that is Premature Burial. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this final track, originally released in the early 90s, sees the band at the peak of their creative powers, yet it certainly ensures that their latest collection ends on a real high.

Put simply, this is a record for fans of well-crafted, well-produced and ultimately very well-executed death metal, with no visible fat in sight and a penchant for bruising riffs and the harshest of vocals. With this being ELECTROCUTION‘s first album in five years, it’s a real pleasure to say that they haven’t lost any of their ferocity or desire to strangle their listeners into submission, and there’s no doubt that this will help the band pick up a whole heap of new fans along the way. Is Psychonolatry cutting edge? No. But with tracks this huge though, does it really matter? Not in the slightest.

Rating: 7/10

Psychonolatry is out now via GoreGorecords.

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