This Australian death metal band features two members of the extremely noisy and decidedly not-for-everyone (even within the already rarefied audience of underground metal) band
Portal
, but they're much more straightforward than that group. Indeed, their mix of full-speed-ahead blastbeats and sludgy doom passages is strongly reminiscent of one of America's longest-running and most revered death metal bands,
Incantation
. Granted,
Impetuous Ritual
are even more musically ferocious than the death metal acts of old, with the vocals almost totally indecipherable and buried in the mix and the guitar solos more like a wave of shimmering dissonance than actual notes played by human fingers, but the lineage is clearly present. The loudest sound in the mix is a sharp, metallic snare drum, proving that there was one person somewhere in the world who heard
Lars Ulrich
's drumming on
Metallica
's
St. Anger
and thought, "That's exactly the sound my band's been after." Everything else is pretty much a blur of savage riffing (whether slow or fast, the guitar sounds like a chain saw stuck in a bucket full of mud) and guttural croaks. This is a good album for absolute death metal diehards, but everyone else will likely be more entertained just by trying to say the title five times fast. ~ Phil Freeman