ALBUM REVIEW: Pyrogenesis – Asphagor

Few black metal bands have been as frustrating to watch unfold as ASPHAGOR. Their third album The Cleansing was a progressive black metal blueprint that took five years to make, yet saw them head for the trenches, ready to fight for the genre’s frontline. Having spent five years navigating no man’s land once more, Pyrogenesis is the sound of a battalion retreating, shuffling sheepishly back into formation like they’ve been shellshocked. 

That’s not to say Pyrogenesis is by any means a bad album. If anything, it’s an exceptional display of black metal bravado; the title track is an all-commanding six-minute blitz of second wave black metal, its dissonantly raw riffs shredded like ripped jeans, whilst The Mizaru Doctrine dines out on delectable Tyronesian double-bass blast-beats, the kind that blister your eardrums in a blizzard of noise that’s undeniably enjoyable. So if guitarists Hybreos and M. Zanesco are firing on all cylinders, what’s the problem? Well, it’s all a bit back to the future. Sure, Pyrogenesis is blackened death metal at its despicable best, but there’s this lingering glass ceiling they can’t crack that contemporaries like BEHEMOTH and WATAIN have shattered into pieces within the five years they’ve been away. 

ASPHAGOR, as they achieved on The Cleansing, attempt to stretch black metal’s boundaries beyond the sum of its parts. Scales Of Retribution serves up melodic death metal of the Gothenburg variety for you to chew on, with a blackened death metal crunch to come on the side; but haven’t we all heard this already on BEHEMOTH’s Opvs Contra Natvram? And Summoning’s suspension in atmospheric darkness is a distorting, dissonant drive down the dark path they weave, yet it’s a sheepish sleeping giant slumbering where WATAIN have already swept in and cleared out. The problem with Pyrogenesis is that it leaves you feeling divinely uninspired to a hellish extent. 

ASPHAGOR’s pursuit of progressive perfection and primal production pushes Pyrogenesis into a state of disrepair. Whilst musically it’s at times a magical display, Morgoth’s vocals are drowned out in a mix worse to wade through than the world’s most destructive mud volcano, Indonesia’s Lusi. Often swimming in the undercurrent of the riffs, which is by no means an unusual thing, the vocals lack the conviction to back up the bravado ASPHAGOR bring – they might win a battle, but they won’t win a war with a leader lost in the mix. 

Away from it’s maddeningly mediocre mixing, Pyrogenesis suffers from its crippling commitment to overindulging itself. Like Augustus Gloop let loose in a chocolate factory, ASPHAGOR run wild with their ideas, stretching out songs that could’ve been triumphs at the three-minute mark into clumsily cumbersome cradles of ideas that run out of gas before the finish line is even in sight. Matricide leaves you channelling your inner Gordon Ramsay, lamenting an overcooked broth of bog-standard black metal that lingers way too long, whilst opener Ex Cathedra’s instrumental shimmer from darkness to light could say so much in a minute, yet spends an extra two talking the same talk and walking the same walk without making a difference.

Whereas The Cleansing promised so much potential for ASPHAGOR, Pyrogenesis serves as a sharp reminder that sleeping in too late won’t only lose you momentum, but will see your ideas grow stale as others forge ahead of you. 

Rating: 5/10

Pyrogenesis is set for release on March 10th via self-release.

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