UNDERGANG - "Til Døden os Skiller" Review

It would have been to imagine a heavier album than Undergang’s Indhentet af Døden. The thing was totally crushing: churning out one stomach-churning groove after another with a hardcore-derived simplicity and a tenderising mallet of a guitar tone. Whilst I loved the album, its complete single-mindedness made me wonder what to expect from a follow-up. What would the point be without some kind of change of tack, when your point was made so emphatically the first time around? In fact Til Døden os Skiller is a change of tack of sorts, though a perfectly logical one given the band's career trajectory. Here, the pounding hardcore rhythms have all but faded away, and in its stead the very sickest forms of death metal have been given space to breathe. This is Undergang playing deeper and slower than ever before, and it is something to behold.
This is an album that wallows. The extravagant slowness of some passages here most clearly brings to mind the early days of Cianide. The latter’s The Dying Truth is perhaps the best example of one of my favourite ways of playing death metal: that which revels in the immediate, visceral pleasure of indulgently down-tempo hooks. Undergang songs like Ormeorgie or Rådden Messe roll out super-slow riffs that manage to be both languid and suffocatingly heavy at the same time, helped in no small measure by the brilliantly deep gurgles that pass for vocals here. Not that it's all one-paced. It's just that the sheer bloody heaviness of these sections weigh like a ball and chain around the feet of the faster parts, dragging it down into this beautifully inviting swamp of decay and lethargy. At times the whole sound seems to be grinding to an ugly halt. The last minute of Når Børnene Dør, for example, is priceless: squelching and staggering forward as David Torturdod’s voice spatters maniacally below.
The album closes with an instrumental, Kadavermarch. This is a level of ambition the band didn’t really have before- a piece based on morbid atmosphere rather than pure riff-power. It works horrifyingly well, with despondent guitar lines that ooze and belch distortion, and a tempo that perfectly matches the trudging, shambling gait implied by the title. It is an unusually descriptive piece of music (even if the scene described is a well-worn cliché), and as such represents an apposite end to the record. This is nasty, primitive music, and all the better for it. Buy this! Fucking buy it!