INVULTATION (USA) – ‘Feral Legion’ LP

American bestial death metal berserker Invultation returns with its second full-length abomination “Feral Legion”, a thirty seven-minute siege of inescapable black/death ruin whose ominous nature and intents are already clear and evident from the album title alone. Indeed, “Feral Legion” takes us forward, or back, to a time once evoked by Einstein in his (supposed) famous words “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. A time in which humanity’s prolonged obsession for power through dominance has reduced the world to a lightless and inhuman prehistoric dark age where primeval animalistic instincts of survival and a complete lack of sanity are the only “logic” reigning. The music marvelously encapsulates this concept unfolding ten dehumanizing, life-scourging slabs of pure shellshock and complete sonic armageddon derived from the immortal legacy of black/death war cults like Blasphemy, Bestial Warlust and Angelcorpse. And while that is the premise and starting point, the means by which Invultation accomplishes its conquest is quite unprecedented for the standards of bestial extreme metal. The “chaos-for-chaos-sake” approach the genre has widely been known for is ignored in favor a hyper-realistic, (technical) death metal-derived approach with a crystalline production that exposes and exalts every moving part in the record, revealing an entity working within an evolved and sophisticated technical and compositional framework in which absolute destruction is achieved solely via the raw tonnage of the riffs and by the superb quality of the performative skill being wielded and weaponized to achieve its conquest of absolute bedlam.