This is the fourth album from Ancst, a shapeshifting German metal band.
You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get from Ancst. Black metal, crust, hardcore, death metal, dark ambient – these are just genres to play with for the band, using and discarding styles and influences at will, depending on the needs of any given release or song. Which brings us to Culture of Brutality, a 35-minute, 20-track album that fuses deathgrind, metalcore, and hardcore into a monster of brutal heaviness.
Culture of Brutality is aptly named, and is an exemplar of devastating heaviness. Short, brutal, ripe with blast beats, and awash with energetic violence, these songs are relentless bursts of aggressive rage.
The black metal aspects have been almost completely removed and the music is a multifaceted mix of death metal, grindcore, hardcore, crust, and metalcore. This formula is then creatively poured into twenty different cast iron moulds, leading to twenty different songs that all crush and slay with the best of them.
Amidst the brutality, the face-smashing riffs, and the humungous beatdowns, come snatches of melody influenced by melodic death metal and/or NWOAHM metalcore. These enrich the twin old-school grindcore and hardcore hearts that sit at the core of Culture of Brutality, putting me in mind of a curious mix of eras, from the 80s, 90s, and 00s primarily. To my ears, Ancst’s latest sounds like a combination of Misery Index, Napalm Death, Nails, and Most Precious Blood, amongst others. This gives a good overall impression of Culture of Brutality‘s strengths, but shouldn’t overshadow the fact that it also exists in its own right too.
Ancst’s latest does not sound like I expected it to sound, and instead has gifted the world with a raging slab of furious heaviness that’s surely destined to ignite mosh pits everywhere. Give this a listen and see what you think.
Wonderbox Metal 