Whorls :"Petrichor"

This band from Denmark is pretty intense. The drummer is an insane cyborg just judging by the intro to the opening song. The vocals a more a-typical dry rasp. These guys hide that fact by throwing everything at you at once.While they can smash your face in with their sonic these guys grasp the importance of songwriting and back enough to let you breathe and give you a false sense of security with the dynamic flip. Blackened Hard core might be the best fitting label, but these guys have the chops of a more progressive styled band. The hit with Meshuggah like precision. Sonically they are more interesting than say anything Meshuggah has done in the past decade. By the second song they are beginning to smother in heaviness.

At a minute and a half "Pax" is short and to the point , but I am not sure I would call it grind core. It's not as rough around the edges."Atheol" the band tries to decide if they should blow by you in a blur of speed or let you bask in the groove. The speed is impressive from a technical stand point , but midway into the album, you have already heard it. I am more interested in where else can this band take me sonically. They hinted at having the ability to do so, but do they have the desire. "Caeles" is blow out from the other song. The album falls into being the kind of assault that eventually descends into white noise , until identifying punches come into play. Sure the album sounds great and the guitar tone they have immortalized is mean as fuck, but unless set against another canvas it eventually falls flat when it fall prey to the jack hammer fuck.

They fall back into a more section piece with "Apex" that hangs out in some sludge like feed back. this song an the other tends to find the one dimensional nature of the vocal making the songs sound similar. They find some really cool dissonant places on "Vacuos" but like the title suggests find them getting sucked back into becoming a blur of formless white noise. They do find there ways into a few break downs and the final songs falls somewhere between a blast beat and a groove. If you just like really well made heavy music that is heavy for the sake of being heavy then these guys are for you. If you require more thought and texture to your metal, you still might be able to appreciate where these guys seem to want to go with this , but get too caught up in the execution to make it. By the times things slow down into a buzzing sludge it is too little too late. What sounded to have more promise becomes sonically monochrome and thus it's blackness is no where near as dark as it could have been.I'll give this a 7 and hope they fine tune the songwriting a little more next time as they have all the talent in the world.




5.6