At the time of Everything is Fire (2009), New Zealand band Ulcerate had just started a small revolution in the world of extreme metal. This album demonstrated that the uncompromising brutality of the most velocity-driven death metal could also be accompanied by an atmosphere of despair. With its new opus, Ulcerate has lost none of its abrasive universe, although there has been a clear evolution towards more accessible tracks.
On Cutting the Throat of God, we are indeed dealing with a form of controlled chaos. Melodic flights of fancy tend to stretch and resolve, rather than cutting abruptly to a flood of dissonance, as was previously customary. Tracks such as ‘The Dawn is Hollow’ and ‘Transfiguration In and Out of Worlds’ conclude on a climactic rise where variations of the same riff overlap maximalistically.
Beneath these layered guitars, we hear a double-pedal mat on which the hands play a backbeat straight up. For Ulcerate, this is a major change. Drummer Jamie Saint Merat’s now-legendary playing is renowned for its propensity to dodge beats and thwart expectations. In fact, this percussive work has tended to drown out rather than reinforce the perception of tempo. On this new album, Saint Merat doses his abstract drumming and makes cheerful use of more seated rhythms.
Overall, Ulcerate are to be applauded for preserving their highly discordant aesthetic while making their music more digestible. This seems a necessary path for a band already on its seventh album. On the other hand, the album’s composition is less than ambitious.
In particular, the vocal performance is rather monotonous, whereas the album Shrines of Paralysis (2016) heralded new experiments in this direction. Also, the album vaguely gives the impression of repeating the formula explored on its predecessor Stare into Death and Be Still (2020).
In time, some will have nothing but praise for this more memorable version of Ulcerate’s language. In form, the pieces are far less labyrinthine. There’s a new acceptance of melody, repetition and squarer rhythm. Cutting the Throat of God is indeed an excellent album for discovering and rediscovering the band. On the other hand, the abandonment of the enigmatic and impenetrable aspect of Ulcerate’s music will undoubtedly be experienced as a loss by a fragment of the audience.
