NETHER

One of the many SIGIL bands out there, this one comes from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and has been around since 2009 and only released a handful of of EPs and albums. The first full-length "Mutagen" came out in 2013 and the sophomore effort NETHER didn't emerge until 2021. This four piece that features Riley Marion (bass), David Horrocks (drums), Peter Tyukasz (guitars) and Clennon Aranha (vocals) delivers a strange mix of dissonant black metal along with atmospheric sludge metal and a rhythmic post-hardcore steadiness.

Fortified with rampaging tracks on the shorter side of things, the post-hardcore rules in the compositional department but dressed up with caustic black metal tones and distortion made all the more eerie by the dissonant tuning habits. The sludge metal comes in in the way the vocals are shouted as well as the guitar bombast. This album features eight tracks and adds up to nearly 38 minutes of aggressive brutality. That is if you count the digital release time line which features the extra track "Cathartic Avulsions." The album doesn't really let up once it starts and the caustic bombastic is incessant. The band's label Total Dissonance Worship sorta says it all!

The riffs are rather spastic and add little strange hooks here and there that throw off the general rhythmic flow without derailing it. The result is a form of controlled chaos that ratchets up the tension to a satisfying degree. The album feels a lot like crust punk in a lot of ways but is more dissonant, more chaotic and features drumming styles of sludge metal and other extreme forms of metal. The vocals are a bit off kilter as well with a strange contrapuntal phrasing where Clennon Aranha shouts over the syncopated parts and only in a haphazard way. The effect is somewhat original even if the music is fairly accessible and mostly from the post-hardcore playbook.

This is a noisy little album that pretty much plays out in its entirely as it started. Heavily distorted guitars and bass in disso-mode with oddball drumming patterns and crazy schizophrenic vocals. It's the stuff outsider musical dreams are made of and it's unrelenting in its dedication to noisy brutality all the way to the end. Somewhat difficult to assign any particular genre tag, this truly is a hybrid of many meta and punk styles fused into a cohesive whole. Extreme in every way, SIGIL delivered a solid piece of work with this one and perhaps not groundbreaking or totally original in every way, sure is a nice little noisy romp for 38 minutes.

3.5 rounded down