Thanatomass "Black Vitriol & Iron Fire" CD Digipack

Well this is a bloody racket. A superfluous statement for an extreme metal review perhaps, but apt all the same. Thanatomass of Russia offer their second EP with half and hours’ worth of material in the form of ‘Black Vitriol and Iron Fire’. As if seeking to solidify the blackened-thrash-rendered-as-noise-rock approach of Teitanblood, Thanatomass operate on a similar trajectory of blunted noise, but with just enough restraint to allow some riffs and drum patterns to leak into the listener’s subconsciousness.
For all the wanton chaos of this style, the lack of subtlety, the rampant barbarism, to make it succeed artistically requires a rather nuanced mind. Dial the chaos up too high and you do indeed end up with something like Teitanblood, a project more interesting as a statement on the limits of sonic expression than for any re-listenable musical qualities. But if you don’t take the extremity far enough you could fall into the realms of the bland, or worse, the ridiculous.
The importance of nuance is down to the fact that one has only two or three musical levers to pull at. There is no melody, just an atonal barrage supplemented by keyless fretboard murder as a stand-in for guitar solos. Droning chords may occasionally be arranged into what we call a “chord sequence”, but the melodic qualities are so supressed as to be negligible. Drums have no room to stretch their flair for a variety of time signatures, or even creative drum patterns. There are two settings: nonstop blast-beats, or ultra-slow doom. Fills are given no chance to breathe. Vocals – rather unsurprisingly – are an unhinged barrage of outbursts that explore the full spectrum of the distorted range, often with little regard for whatever rhythmic qualities are present within the music they are set to.
But limiting the creative levers one can pull at is a good way to separate musicians from artists. A lot of people find prog distasteful because it gorges itself on music, leaving no plate untouched when it comes to musical excesses, until the final output looks vulgar, crass, extravagant (some people…not me). But Thanatomass – for all the excesses of extremity to be found on this EP – are frugal by comparison to the Emerson, Lake & Palmers of the world. They are a single bowl of gruel, into which they must pour all their passion, creativity, and imagination to render it as music worthy of the name.
And that is precisely what they have achieved on ‘Black Vitriol and Iron Fire’. By pitching their take on extreme blackened thrash just beyond Slaughtbbath and just below Teitanblood, they have created a sound that is at once exhilarating yet deep enough to warrant multiple listens. The switches between tempos, basic as each rhythm is, occur frequently enough to keep the music in constant churn whilst allowing us to grow accustomed to each moment. Each individual riff is simple enough, but they are so frequent and numerous that they compound on one another, resulting in something that could pass for complexity.
The barrage of distorted guitars is broken up by screaming leads at one end, and doom at the other. Once the drum battering loses its lustre we are gifted a brief respite in the form of dark ambience. Vocals may be a constant presence, but they never settle on the same pitch range for longer than is welcome. All this rather paradoxically means that Thanatomass have offered us a demonstration of the virtues of restraint within this style. Musical excess is the real vulgarity, and there is absolutely none of that here. The hyperbolic theatrics that are associated with this brand of blackened thrash are all for show, covering what is in fact a sober exercise in the virtues of fragility.

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