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Review: 'Hymn'
'Breach Us'   

-  Label: 'Fysisk Format'
-  Genre: 'Heavy Metal' -  Release Date: '28th August 2020'

Our Rating:
Oh yes. Heavy, slow-grinding metal that churns murky riffery that’s so suffocatingly dense it makes you want to spew is still very much a thing. Hymn’s latest (burnt) offering, ‘Breach Us’ is a scorched sinewy mass of doomy abrasion, and the title track is a devastating tour of hell, like Neurosis on speed, gritty, grainy, but detailed and earthy at its distorted, mangled roots.

This is a hollering, screaming, mess of pain backed by a grainy, grey, charred tempest of doom forged by drums, bass, and guitar. This is the black shit, alright, and things come none more black than the ten-minute ‘Exit Though Fire’, with its ultra-thrashy rapidfire riff. Toward the end, it slows to such a crawl as to barely move, a depth so low as to be subterranean, the bass sounding like the tearing of amp corrugated cardboard.

‘Crimson’ is simply fucking savage in the intro, a brutal sonic assault that lands hard and fast like the whipping of the rotas on a helicopter. It’s unsustainable, but yields to a sliding wall of sludge, over which Ole Rokseth, in a vocal that calls to mind equally Ozzy and Melvins – and maybe with a hint of Mike Patten an even Lane Staley – sneers, snarls, croons and flexes. It concludes with a tempestuous climax that is nothing short of furious and obliterative.

There are moments in the thirteen-minute climactic closer, ‘Can I Carry You’ that bring melodic relief. Equally, there are numerous segments of joyful, driving riffery that chugs away, hard, at a single chord or two, propelled by Markus Støle’s powerhouse drumming. But at around the ten-minute mark, it plunges new depths of murky grime, and trudges away to a leaden, cyclical riff that grinds to the close with devastating effect.

How they’re only a duo, and yet yield tis much volume and density, I will never know.


  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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