Heteropsy has finally taken the plunge.
After four EPs, Shigenori Tamura (drums/guitar, Frostvore), Koki Fukushima (bass/vocals, Frostvore), Kota Maruyama (guitar), and Hiroki Sasaki (bass) announce the release of their first album, Embalming, on Caligari Records.
The album opens with The Dawning, a slow and oppressive introduction where we discover a first riff infused with the unholy HM-2, that pedal with such a characteristic sound, but also with a slightly melancholic touch, followed by a polished solo before moving on to Pandemonium Alter, which welcomes the first morbid roars. The raw and jerky rhythm section rages in waves, but allows the band to develop some lead parts while exploiting their doom roots before moving on to The Sodomizer, which takes more or less the same approach with catchy simplicity. The vocals are not to be outdone, haunting the abrasive instrumental with macabre tones, then the album continues with Asphyxia, a putrid mix and to the metal to honor its sizzling Swedish inspirations. While the first part of the track is fairly slow, the rest is much more explosive, only slowing down again to reach Memento Mori, which allows us to catch our breath with a gentle melody before returning to a more chaotic approach combining screams, tortured leads, and a solid foundation. At times flirting with melodic death metal, the track is quite catchy, while Seventh Damnation remains on more old-school foundations to build its raw riffs and offer us patterns that are catchy in their violence. However, the track is broken in two and continues in a slightly calmer vein until Methadone, which initially acts as a kind of interlude, taking several minutes before finally offering us its dissonant riffs, then Old Friends ends the album with more than nine minutes of this thick, heavy, jerky sound, but also laden with cavernous screams, which stops for a moment only to return with a more haunting approach before concluding the track.
Honoring its Swedish influences under HM-2, Heteropsy has everything to please fans of the scene: dirty sound, slow riffs, hoarse growls… I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said that Embalming was created in 1990…
80/100
