Spain may not be the hottest of metal hot beds, but the once former champion state of all things Catholicism has spat forth their fair share of musical blasphemy. However there may be no Spanish bands more blasphemous, none more downright savage in their musical leanings as the relatively new outfit, Suspiral.
Fresh off the heals of their debut full-length album, Delve into the Mysteries of Transcendence, Suspiral are a band that stand at the threshold of a potentially long and fruitful career, one filled with ferocious displays of calculated cacophony and the personal approval of a particular fallen angel. Suspiral describe themselves on their Facebook page as simply, ‘black metal.’ While both the first and second waves are clearly and proudly woven into the fabric of Suspiral’s sound (especially on album closer “The Art of Death”) so too are the grimiest slabs of classic death metal and the end result is pure sonic Armageddon.
Split into just three tracks, Suspiral drop over 30 minutes of blast beats, tremolo picking, unholy howls, and enough wicked atmosphere to blot out the sun and darken the skies forever and ever, amen. Almost from start to finish each track is just an unrelenting barrage, sans the occasional pause to stop and catch your breath a bit. It’s an album that winds up very quickly becoming a full on attack on anything considered ‘good’ and ‘normal’ and ‘safe.’ Replete with monstrous guitar solos, paying a loving homage to all the great death metal guitarists who could shred with the best of them circa 1991 and an ability to make those aforementioned blast beats and tremolo picking sound even more frightening than originally intended through sheer will alone, Susprial have offered up something of a left hook when you are waiting for the right cross.
Yet despite the length of each track there is never really an opportunity for them to grow stale or your attention to be diverted too far away at any point. Take the album’s final cut where the deluge of wave after wave of black metal are cut down like a tree after roughly six minutes in order to make way for a trudging and walk through doom-soaked aesthetics, only to be rocked back into the brutality of mid-tempo, blackened death metal madness. While quantifying what you are hearing on this album with the somewhat simplistic ‘black metal’ label may suffice, the end game here is one that just feels more complex and more dangerous than what half of the world’s ‘black metal’ bands are churning out. However you want to categorize it, this is not an album not for the fainthearted, that’s for sure.
Delve into the Mystery of Transcendence is out now via I, Voidhanger Records. You can experience and purchase the album at the Suspiral Bandcamp page.
