Ulsect – Ulsect (Review)

This is the debut album from Ulsect, a death/black metal band from the Netherlands.

Ulsect specialise in technical/avant-garde/dissonant death metal, with heavy atmosphere and blackened aesthetics.

This is sinister and malevolent music, fusing the early work of dark dissonant extremists like Gorguts, Meshuggah, Ulcerate, and Deathspell Omega, with a nightmare vision for what extreme music should be in 2017. This is post-death metal that takes the power and strengths from the style, weaving it into something otherworldly and downright evil.

What differentiates Ulsect from a lot of the other quality purveyors of dissonant, avant-garde death metal, (Sunless, John Frum, and Coma Cluster Void are all recent examples), is their use of bleak apocalyptic blackened atmosphere. Honestly, sometimes listening to this album is like being suffocated by darkness.

Ulsect are oppressively heavy, but without ever becoming overly impenetrable, as this kind of thing can so easily become. This is due to the band’s clever use of light and darkness; of crushing weight and shaded malice. The music is brutally overbearing, fusing monolithic riffs that sound like a wall is falling on you, with a kind of cruelly expansive and spacious void-worship, one that almost makes you feel like you might escape the event horizon of the band’s delivery. Of course, you never do.

Like the aural equivalent of an existential nightmare, the music on this release unleashes a controlled savagery on the listener, alongside atmospheric retrospection that complements and contributes to the dread malevolence in such a way as to make everything here sound even more malignant than it should.

This is absolutely not a band for the casual metal fan. However, it is absolutely one I feel compelled to recommend, no matter how harrowing it is.