Album Review : Matthew Revert - Hail Obliteration (2021)
* Follow me on: Facebook - Twitter - Instagram *
The late DMX once said: “However the fuck you want to feel, there should be a song that helps you feel that way…who the fuck wants to be happy all the time?” You might not relate to this, but I do. I got what I call rainy day music. Music that is so fucking nasty and oppressive that it helps me purges the darkest, most vile emotions I can experience. Matthew Revert’s Hail Obliteration is rainy day music at its best. Songs to let it bleed on.
Forget what you now about black metal. This isn’t black metal. This isn’t doom metal either. We’re a hundred miles out of Tremolo Picking City, deep into the darkest forest. We’re in Khanate, Abruptum and Sutekh Hexen territory. A slow, lengthy and predatory nightmare that squeezes the life out of you. Walls of sound that command your attention. Shrieking vocals that keep you in the moment. Enough reverb and feedback to make you scream for mercy.
There are only two songs on Hail Obliteration. Twenty minutes each. The title song is a rather straightforward affair, halfway between Sunn O)))’s obsessive drone, Khanate’s raw, screeching pain and power electronics chaos. It doesn’t evolve much, but it crawls up your brain stem with the gracefulness of a hungry dinosaur. The lyrics tell a story of self-loathing and isolation that wraps the crushing arrangements into a shroud of agonizing self-awareness.
The B side Landfall is a more down tuned, pulverizing affair. It’s not quite conventional black metal either, but there is a more recognizable structure. Better defined guitar riffs that blaze a path through the primordial chaos. It still hits your with the raw power of a hurricane, but unlike for the title track you can make you way through it. Not sure which one I like the most, but he two songs crushed any negative emotion I harbored under their sheer weight.
I believe it was the point.
Matthew Revert’s Hail Obliteration is extremely raw and confronting. It’s not music you can listen to every day. It’s like a monster you let loose every once in a while to cleanse the populace out of the wicked and impure. Most likely, one listen will be enough. I’m so glad an artist came through under his own civilian name and just decided to make that music for the purpose it was intended to. It’s liberating. Hail Obliteration is an apocalypse that you keep waking up from.
This is the first release from a new label called The Geryoneis. There will be a limited 100 cassette tapes run and it’ll be digital downloads for everyone else. Hail Obliteration is not easy music. I wouldn’t even call it conventionally pleasant. But it’s powerful stuff. It’s so crushingly heavy and mean that Tony Iommi is probably having nightmares about it. It’s a monument to destruction that will annihilate anything you can feel about yourself and it feels fucking great.
If someone argues that he doesn’t like because “it’s not black metal” or whatever, call him a basic bitch, make him a baloney sandwich and walk away. This is not music for cowards, so don’t waste your time with them.
8.3/10
