POSSESSIVE – Res Ipsa Loquitur

vote
7.0

• Bands:
  POSSESSIVE
• Duration: 00:33:06
• Available from: 07/11/2024
• Label:

• Burn Records

It's a sound that propagates malevolent and creeping, that of the Americans Possessive, who arrived with “Res Ipsa Loquitur” at the debut album after being intercepted by our local Brucia Records, a label now accustomed to sponsoring underground realities with a disturbed and disturbing slant.
The trio, born from an offshoot of the black metallers Tempestarii and Lunar Temple, engages in a sort of dark shamanic ritual that leaves no room for doubt about its destructive intentions and its vision of extreme metal, the result of the alchemical union of various current and attributable – broadly speaking – to the misanthropic school of Primitive Man, Full of Hell and Dragged into Sunlight.
A dense and very black flow, in which black/death, sludge and instances of grind/powerviolence are distilled and allowed to slide in a tracklist of six songs for just over half an hour of music, even if in fact the result is a single suite from the precise development and which invites continued assimilation, without interruptions, to be fully enjoyed.
From the tribal-like incipit of “Sun and Moon” to the noisy conclusion of “Sure Sign of the Nail”, the impression is in all respects that the band wants to carry out an evocation in the impervious forests of its land of origin – the 'Idaho – among animal bones, rocks and putrescent undergrowth, then standing out for a gesture capable of making even the most sudden transitions (think of the brutal acceleration of “Renege”) fluid and spontaneous.
All things considered, it is above all from the care placed in these details concerning the writing (then extended to the sound performance and the graphic design) that the experience of these musicians emerges more forcefully from the whole, rather than from the personality of the individual passages, the which – despite counting on powerful riffs and a chilling interpretation on the microphone – do not (yet) possess a trait that distinguishes them in the contemporary blackened sludge cauldron.
Therefore, having established that the authority and expressiveness of a “Scorn”, a “Trumpetic Ecstasy” or a “Hatred for Mankind” are not achieved by this first full-length by Possessive, the overall experience still remains one of those recommended, especially if you are looking for a record organically poised between fleshless explosions and slimy cadences, between the more nihilistic metal world and the more hallucinated and deformed, and which in its hybrid approach does not go on too long, keeping everything within the threshold of a functional and digestible running time.
A slap immersed in a hostile and spirited atmosphere, which can be said to give hope for a career continuation worthy of uncomfortable comparisons.