Band:	Mefitis
Album:	Offscourings
Style:	Black metal, Death metal
Release date:	January 2021

01. Wandering The Tideland
02. Meridian Artefact
03. Kosmodrome
04. Castling In Sediment
05. The Witherways
06. Fenshaden Deeps
07. Offscourings
08. Sonstead Blight

There are two big requirements for a great death metal release: emulating the right bands, and writing killer riffs. Mefitis hit both of these right on the head.

I somehow managed to miss Mefitis' debut, Emberdawn, when it came out in 2019, and I consider that a personal failure on my behalf, since most of the praise you could give Offscourings applies to it as well. And it also has a better cover art. But the fact that they released their debut in 2019 hides the other fact that they've been around for at least one decade prior to that, releasing two demos in 2008 and 2009. The 2010s have been pretty quiet in the Mefitis, up until the release of Emberdawn, as it seems that neither of the two main members were publicly involved in any other projects. Though it would be fun to speculate about the music that could've been released in the meantime, Offscourings makes me glad that some music finally did come out of Mefitis.

I did mention that emulating the right bands is a pretty big requirement for a successful death metal release, and the right bands were certainly chosen here. Mefitis sound sounds a lot like death metal from the early to mid 90s, when it was done evolving from its thrash roots and it veered into melodic, blackened and progressive territories. You can find bits of Sentenced, Dissection, Amorphis, At The Gates, Edge Of Sanity, Opeth, Cynic, Gorguts and a whole bunch of other names I can drop, though most of them having since left the sound I'm referencing. Someone with even more knowledge and a better year than me could probably pinpoint these influences and map them to parts of the songs, but I feel like that's a bit harder to do for Offscourings than it was for Emberdawn, as if there was a bit more time for the different ingredients of this death metal stew to cook together. You can still pick apart the ingredients, but it's a stew more than it is a bunch of vegetables put together. With just another Mefitis album to compare it too, it might be too early to talk about a Mefitis sound, but this pretty surely has it.

As for the second requirement: it's not enough to look up to the right bands, you've got to have the skill to actually come up with something that lives up to said influence. And these progressive blackened edges aren't really something you can half-ass. So instead Mefitis go all in on writing tons of melodic riffs that constantly keep changing, avoiding repetition as much as possible, often switching paces, and creating an incredibly dynamic and forward thinking album as a result. Almost Voivod-esque in the off-kilter approach, but definitely more of a clusterfuck of riffs, though none of them are really too much on the heavy / crunchy side. They're melodic but in a very non-cheesy way. And though the band constantly throws riffs in the listener's face, the album never feels disjointed, with the flow and the glue being quite seamless, which is probably the most impressive thing about the record. Couple that with an old-school lo-fi production to truly make you feel like you're in the time when innovation was the norm in extreme metal. The vocals are far from one-dimensional, but I feel that out of everything that is razor sharp on Offscourings, it's them that feel the least impressive.

With how much I often felt like death metal recently is starting to blend together as much as I enjoy it, when something like Mefitis comes along, it makes it even harder for everybody else. Their influences are far from obscure, so the rest of the scene has no excuse for not being as exciting.