ALBUM REVIEW: The Word Of His Law – Egregore
Featuring members of AUROCH and MITOCHONDRION, EGREGORE may be a new name within extreme metal, but they are certainly a very promising one. The Canadian duo’s brand of blackened death metal is a raucous and feral one, taking a lot of cues from the genre’s classic sound, whilst adding their own distinct flavour into the mix. The band’s debut album, and very first recording, The Word Of His Law, showcases some exceptionally monstrous and frenetic death metal with a few surprising but ultimately impressive flourishes that set them apart from many of their contemporaries.
The opening instrumental piece, The Place And The Time, serves as an ominous start to the record, with ambience and minimal percussion building a foreboding tone right out of the gate. From here the band launch straight into Howling Premonition – an energetic and chaotic piece of jarring, frenetic death metal with demented guitar work, ferocious drums and arid, caustic vocal. It features some excellent but brief hazier tones and slick melodicism thrown in which lend an ethereal edge and a little catchiness to proceedings without taking away from the more aggressive elements that make up the song’s bulk.
Exfiltrating The Triangle is, if anything, even more unflinchingly rabid and discordant than the preceding track, with faster and leaner guitars, tight, punishing drums and a decidedly harsher, sinister vocal all combining to create a dizzying and savage blend that couples classic extreme metal tropes with the unhinged speed of grindcore, with brilliant results. Reborn As The Word Of His Law is yet another feral track, with thunderous drumming providing a cavernous backdrop to the dissonant guitar hooks and more prominent, sludgy bass sound. The vocal performance on here is easily one of the stand outs on the record thus far, ranging from eerie whispers to vicious howls, and contributes to making this particular track a far more dramatic and engrossing one.
Libidinization Of Will Azothic strips away many of the more cacophonous parts of the band’s sound in favour of a tighter and extremely cinematic approach. It sees the diverse vocals of the previous offering matched and counterpointed by soaring riffs that descend into thick, rhythmic sections, giving this a more robust and focused feel, although the grating and unpredictable sections that have defined this album’s sound so far are still very much present as the song progresses towards its most compelling moments in its closing few minutes, introducing haunting chanted vocals into the mix, adding yet another dynamic to this song that sets it apart and elevates it above what has come before it in the listener’s memory.
An Address To Abraxas departs even further from the style that has been established up to this point, with a polished, airy guitar sound and acoustic passages giving this a lighter sound. There are reserved clean vocals here which turn this song into a hypnotic and almost ritualistic affair that strips away all of the overt metal elements altogether, feeling closer to the ambience of the short track that opened the record. It’s a bold and lurching change of pace that pays dividends, concluding this brilliant debut on an incredibly impressive note.
It’s rare to come across a band that manages to nail their sound and style on not just their first album, but their very first release. But EGREGORE have more than pulled it off, crafting an album that has one foot firmly planted in extreme metal’s more primordial components whilst managing to stand out and incorporate fresh elements into it. With the majority of the album featuring a murky, sepulchral production and some fantastically visceral and inspired musicianship, it should appeal to most fans, especially those who like their music more bellicose and atonal, while the addition of the sombre ambience of the opening track and the acoustic-tinged, ritualistic bent of the final one hints at another side to the band that will hopefully be explored more thoroughly on future records. As far as laying foundations on which to build future music goes, The Word Of His Law sets a very lofty bar for the band, and indeed many of their peers, to surmount.
Rating: 9/10
The Word Of His Law is out now via 20 Buck Spin.
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