Aeviterne – The Ailing Facade (Review)

Aeviterne are a death metal band from the US and this is their debut album.

Aeviterne contain current and ex-members of bands such as Artificial Brain, Tombs, and Pillory, and play a brutal form of death metal with experimental tendencies.

Aeviterne spend 51 minutes horrifying and brutalising the listener with their atypical death metal. Alongside the traditional components you would expect to hear on a death metal album sit industrial influences, noise elements, and electronic enhancements. The music brings together aspects of the dissonant, technical, and progressive styles, and then cruelly processes them together into a hideous death metal terror factory. Imagine a mix of Ulcerate, Immolation, Headshrinker, Full of Hell, Pyrrhon, and Godflesh, and you will be on the right lines.

The band’s multifaceted sound is dense and unforgiving. The non-standard songwriting gives us a collection of tracks that don’t always behave as you would expect them too. Jagged detours and serrated atmospheres confuse and bewilder. Percussive layers and dynamic dissonance pulverise and flay. The album’s brutal soundscapes unfold seemingly unpredictably, yet they actually do so with non-random algorithmic precision; the entire thing is strictly controlled, yet in a such a sickeningly fertile, grimly vibrant way that the music sounds alive and unplanned.

The songs showcase a range of abilities across the album’s duration, from brutal blast beats to atmospheric Hellscapes. Aeviterne like to test themselves, and have pushed their capabilities so that each of the eight songs has its own malignant personality within the album’s corrupted network of interlinked tracks.

This is an exceptionally-crafted work. The Ailing Facade offers a harrowing depth and substance that traditional death metal usually lacks, and is all the better for it.

Essential listening.