I’m not super familiar with the German brutal/slam death metal scene. I’ve only heard one band/album and it’s Architect of Dissonance‘s Realm of the Deviant Throne, and that was a mighty fine slab of slam. So when the third album from Germany’s Arcanius showed up, a band name I heard mentioned in the same breath as Architect of Dissonance, I thought I’d give it a go.

Some review require elegant wordplay and eloquence to describe an album.  A written simile to set the moods, describe the hues and articulate the album’s depth and breath. This is not one of those reviews. This is not one of those album. This is a 31 minutes of getting face fucked by an 800 lb silverback gorilla.

Make no illusions,  this form of knuckle dragging, lowest common denominator, down tempo slam death metal is as simple as it gets, and a sure fire hit with the larger foreheaded  Neanderthal death metal slam fans that still lurk in caves and swamps. But I’ll be damned is this isn’t some effective, heavy, skull pounding stuff that does exactly what it sets out to do. That said, it does veer away from the genre’s usual misogynistic, gore soaked  tropes of their earlier works with more hardcore styled titles like “The True Reign”, “Warpath” “Built on Tradition” and “Kingmaker” as opposed to the likes of “The Echo of Her Cracking Chest” or “Shanty Town Hooker”.

It comes across as a 31 minute song with barely any difference between the fast and the slow parts and the low inhaled vocals, but when they bring the slam, they bring it fucking  hard. Even if in short bursts, opener “Born A King”, “Outlaw” and the incredible slam in “Battle Scars” are super effective deliveries ultra heavy slams will deliver full on devastation and imagine appeal to a wider down tempo/deathcore/hardcore/straightedge/ crowd killer type of fan as well.

S0, if you like the likes of Kraanium, Dysentery, Abominable Putritidy, Vulvodynia and such, this is a no brainer. Pun fully intended.

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