NUCLEARHAMMER

Here is another example of an album title that could not be more fitting to the music. On "Obliteration Ritual", Toronto's NUCLEARHAMMER conducts an exercise in front to back morbid black/death ritualizing that seeks first to decimate and only after to offer some form of understanding of the bleak realities uncovered therein. It is an album best suited to those pining for only the most extreme levels of death defiance and psychological diabolism.

Words like "grim" and "evil" barely do justice to the abominations on display, though "bestial" is one you'll often seen associated with the act, and rightly so. In the never-ending search for the creation of foreboding ambience by the underground's deepest dwellers, NUCLEARHAMMER is one band that does not so much create it, which frequently implies conscious effort, as effortlessly harnesses it as a byproduct of its collective blackened soul. Cavernous grunts, chilling screams, and suitably selective samples, accompany a style that runs from primitive thrash and primal black metal to the most godforsaken doom with points in between that could only be described as a subspecies of INCANTATION's earliest death metal offerings. The barbaric sound quality, a compliment in this context, offers a suffocating degree of low-end riff crush, atonal lead peppering, and subsonic frequencies that steadily pull the listener down into a kind of involuntary hypnosis. "Obliteration Ritual" does not invite, it captures and tortures until complete submission is reached.

The final cut, the 16-minute "Winters Profane Acrimony" is one of the most hellish journeys into the heart of doom that you will ever hear, one that is inclusive of monolithic, bone chilling riffs and long stretches of crackling, thunderstorm sounds that are anything but overdone. It is the grand finale to a campaign of malevolence by a band intent on the total destruction of one's faith in a higher power and the propagandized belief in the inherent goodness of man.