### Ulcerate: The destroyers of all

#### 10/02/11 || Khlysty

If one wants to know more about Ulcerate, I suppose one will have to go and read The Duff’s reviews of “Of Fracture And Failure” and of “Everything Is Fire”, where our boy rains praise upon the heads of those left-brained New Zealanders. Now, me, even though I heard lotsa good things about the band, I never checked them out. Laziness. No time. Other bands that interested me more. Hate MySpace and the music clips therein. And so on, and so forth. Sue me. Anyway, my point is that I come to this review a total virgin, as far as Ulcerate’s idiosyncratic sound is concerned.

Now, I have to ask you something. What’s in a name? I mean, when one names, say, a sub-genre of music, how does he do it? And, even more, does the name really and truly signify the music it’s come to describe? Waxing philosophical is not exactly my point, but in the case of Ulcerate – and not in the case of, say, In Flames – I think that the term “melodic death metal” perfectly describes the music the band creates. Of course, Ulcerate’s work has no connection whatsoever with the bands and the overall sound the term was deemed proper to describe. No In Flames, no At The Gates, no Göteborg sound here. Just Melodic Death Metal. In that, the music is obviously death metal: slithery constantly shifting time signatures, almost constant blasting, vocals painfully growled, a fecundity of riffs and complex songwriting. In that, everything is completely informed by melodies.

I know, I know, Khlysty’s no fool: even the most discordant, dissonant and unmelodious song has some kind of melody that informs it. But, in Ulcerate’s case the melody – clear, obvious, well-defined – is the basis from which explodes the sonic mindfuckery the band unleashes to the audience. See, while, as I said, the melody is well-defined, the guitars attack it ferociously, either spewing forth malformed swathes of note runs, or tearing it apart with barely-controlled leads of dissonance (listen to the peaking of “Cold Becoming” for reference…). Only the bass and the occasional rhythm guitar parts hold the melodic fort, once a song starts rolling and/or morphing.

The term “beautiful” cannot usually be associated with such ferocious material. Nonetheless, I will call the music beautiful, in an alien and dislocating way, as if seeing one of the wonderful and terrible vistas Lovecraft and Barker sometimes allude to in their fiction. The riffery doesn’t seem extraordinarily difficult – maybe it is, I ain’t no musician so I can’t really tell – but it exudes such majesty and menace as to make the music an imposing monster that awes the listener. Small changes in dynamics give breathing space before the next onslaught. Passages of pure angularity are followed by almost hummable bridges. And, while listening to “The Destroyers Of All” I really go the analogy some people made with Gorguts’ notorious “Obscura”: both records are defiant experiments of sound, texture and structure that piss all over the death metal canon.

But, where Gorguts went for a, let’s say, creative use of dissonance, though, Ulcerate turn towards clearly-defined consonance as a means to achieve their extraordinary musical feat: creating music that runs the gamut from introspective to majestic to overtly aggressive, without never losing steam or focus. I won’t comment on musicianship or production values: they’re both stellar, that’s all you need to know. The bottom line here is, of course, that “The Destroyers Of All” is one of the best death metal records I’ve ever heard, one sure-fire contender for year-end top-five material and one of these records that, given attention and time, will prove that its gifts are more varied and magickal and monstrous than one might expect on first listen. Prerequisite listen, if there ever was one.

- Information
- Released: 2011
- Label: Willowtip Records
- Website: www.ulcerate-official.com
- Band
- Paul Kelland: vocals, bass
- Michael Hoggard: guitars
- Jamie Saint Merat: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Burning skies
- 02. Dead oceans
- 03. Cold becoming
- 04. Beneath
- 05. The hollow idols
- 06. Omens
- 07. The destroyers of all