Hearing an album like this after two clockwork releases like Lust of Decay and Insidious Decrepancy was a relief. Axis of Advance (ex-Sacramentary Abolishment) play this kind of filthy, totally original mixture of extreme Death Metal which is at times difficult to decrypt. The songs are crazed and deviated in the vein of old Order From Chaos, yet you get moments of Australian thrashing blasts a la Abominator or Black Witchery, and moments of breath ripping unmelodic tempo shreds a la Revenge. Listening to this album is not easy, you might not be used to the production which makes the guitars a bit falling behind and the drums taking predominance, but other than that the point about this album is that it's absoltely non standard. I pity the fool who said this album is Black Metal becouse there is really nothing here except for the raw sound that might recall a bit of the 80s general Black Metal spirit. Anyway it has nothing to do with '90s Black metal for sure. The vocals are a mix of brutal growls and screams which just meld in the mix and pops out constantly; you have a real maelstrom of riffs going on here, with a consistent dose of Slayer like solos a fat metallic bass sound giving lot of body to the guitarwork, and atypical drumming with some martial snare drum tricks a la Morbid Angel. It's good to hear a band so extreme without being directly assimilable to anything else. The songs are just freshly chaotic and instinctive and they have a clear pattern which can be followed among the chaos. Savage while traditional in its singular elements, this is a band with shitloads of originality, they surely made quite some steps since the Sacramentary Abolishment days able to mix moments of ultraviolent music with slightly dissonant obscure passages or almost melancholic melodies, which then get truncated by hammering martial beats and wicked solos. While their imagery is purely War Metal, the lyrics deal more with sci-fi scenes of apocalyptic planetary wars than second world war, kind of Laibach martial aesthetics meets Orwell/Philip Dick. There is a superb mixture of violence and class in this disc, this is a highly reccomended release, Red Stream for US, Osmose for the rest of the world.

 

Tracks (8): 1 - Of One To Conflict It 2 - Revolution Decimation 3 - Veiled Cast of Judgement 4 - Wrath Pounding 5 - God-Eye Command 6 - In Wait Lie 7 - Cube of Odium 8 - Masterrorder