Aberration – Refracture (Review)

This is the debut album from US death metal band Aberration.

Hot on the heels of January’s split with Diabolic Oath comes the hideous 42-minute Refracture. After that release, I was looking forward to hearing more from both bands, but I wasn’t expecting something so soon.

Aberration are brought to us by members of Nothingness, Void Rot, and Suffering Hour, and Refracture lives up to my expectations based not only on the output of these groups, but also on the split mentioned above.

Aberration’s death metal is dark and abyssal. It’s a grim, blackened nightmare that descends into lightless doom depths when it’s feeling particularly ravenous. The music’s cold intensity is bracing, its apocalyptic atmospheres corrosive, and its corrupted brutal heart torn open for all to see.

An unholy union of atmospheric decay and primal savagery is chained with lethal precision to the iron will of the otherworldly intellects that direct the music. It is charged with a ferocious darkness, but the feral abandon that this could so easily devolve into is instead channelled into something else, something far more dangerous and malignant.

The songs lay waste with their devastating dissonant assault and their walls of impenetrable teeth. Daemonic screams and monstrous growls lacerate the mind, while the body is pulverised by caustic abominations that brutalise and degrade.

Refracture is a howling mutagenic plague of sentient horror come to scour the land of life and hope. As you blindly wander through the album’s frozen landscape, taking in the barren, inhospitable, and scarred vistas, you surely know that all is lost. A pervading aura of sinister malevolence is palpable, and the threat of existential endings is merely a whisper away. Refracture is the sound of cataclysmic upheaval and grotesque terror made manifest, so prepare yourself as best as you can for the coming of Aberration, herald of the final days.

One for connoisseurs of the underworld, and for adherents of bands such as Golgothan Remains,  Archgoat, Abyssal, Deathspell Omega, Ad Nauseam, Ulcerate, and Altarage.