Samael's Dark Storm 'Above'

Listen carefully, to the song "Virtual War," from Samael's album Above…with its galloping thunderbeats, graveyard vocals, and guitars that brutally slice-and-dice your medulla oblongata into french fries ready for a bubbling hot acid bath…that, children, is the sound of the apocalypse….

Switzerland's Samael has a long and storied history of pummeling our ear cavities into submission, reducing our punch-drunk cerebellums into a greasy mush unfit to even make pet food outta. With Above, however, this dark-hued Swiss death machine has delivered an album that is so imposing, so damn physically demanding that it's certain to put some metal fans on a one-way bus to crazytown.

Every song on Above is availed of a blistering, unrelenting, and wearing blastbeat that bounces around yer skullplate like a jackhammer chopping up concrete. The sound is something like what I'd imagine a building collapsing on my noggin would feel like, kind of like drowning in a tsunami of rusted rebar, drywall dust, and shattered glass. Waves of sonic percussions run rampant through the mix, detaching your brain from logical thought while preparing it for the sweet-n-sour vinegar bath to follow.

After the explosive rhythms have knocked you down, vocalist Vorphalack climbs astride your chest, pushing all of the air from your lungs. With his guttural sandpaper vocals, he gargles some corrosive lyrics about black holes and "illumination" and darkness and dreams or something. Maybe it loses something in translation, or maybe I've gone without sleep far too long listening to this beast of an album, but I'm pretty sure that you'd have to be jacked up on some sort of hallucinogen for "Polygames" to make any damn sense, in any language. Hey, mph, indeed!

Did I mention the guitars, those unholy freakin' guitars? Some shaggy rabid golem called Makro wields his instrument like a Viking battle-axe, and what his six strings won't cut through, he just bludgeons into a mudpuddle with two-ton rhythms. Beneath the percussive wall of sound and Vorp's diabolic vocal assault, Makro's fretwork pierces the darkness with a laser-like intensity, dropping riff bombs one moment and blossoming into man-chewing leads the next, like that cannibalistic plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

In the end, Above runs just short of forty-five minutes, delivering an onslaught of uncompromising, soul-crunching, gut-wrenching cheap thrills that bulldozes just about any other death metal band beneath a thick layer of molten asphalt. Anything less would be a tease, anything more might be classified as torture under the conditions of the Geneva Convention. (Nuclear Blast Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Above from Amazon.com)