The Spanish Teitanblood has a special place in my dark, corrupted heart, as I’ve been following them since the release of their bestial debut album, Seven Chalices. This was at a time when I just started to get into the deeper end of extreme metal; growls, blastbeats, and distortion were already a part of my daily soundtrack, but listening to that murky album back in 2009 felt like an intimidating schooling on just how dark the genre could really get. Knowing the art of patience and precision, Teitanblood has stuck with their roughly 5-year period in between albums. When you end up with a masterpiece such as Death, why would you rush it?
But let’s focus on the present now, as From The Visceral Abyss effortlessly builds upon the legacy of Teitanblood’s past. To tell you the truth, there is nothing particularly new here when it comes to style. It’s hard to argue against that, because there are not many bands within the realm of blackened death metal that have been consistently good for over two decades quite like these guys have. The drums are still frightening with their bombastic display of savagery (see “Sepulchral Carrion God” and the title track), while the vocals continue to sound like a vortex of all the bosses from the Doom franchise screaming and whispering at the same time. The riffs and solos are of course as wild and twisted as they have always been, at times so disorienting the band achieves a hellish brand of psychedelia. So yeah, business as usual for Teitanblood.
But as Vincent Vega would say: It’s the little differences. Teitanblood’s previous opus, The Baneful Choir, was a brilliant record in its own right, but the overwhelming, almost cavernous, quality to its sound made it a bit of an impenetrable affair for newcomers. With a few minor alterations on From The Visceral Abyss, Teitanblood has aced the production for this style of death metal. The sound is punchy, relatively clear, and loud, thus giving proper focus to the deliciously evil riffs. This is probably Teitanblood at their most direct and riff-focused since their debut, as the band left very little room to the ambient passages that were usually sprinkled in between the violent assaults.
Rarely has extreme metal sounded this good and evil, and now that the band’s production work has reached its peak, there is very little that stands between Teitanblood and the title of best death metal album of the year.
