STRYCHNOS – Armageddon Patronage

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  STRYCHNOS
• Duration: 00:42:56
• Available from: 05/17/2024
• Label:

• Dark Descent

Streaming not yet available

Having been welcomed into the line-up of the leaders of the Danish death metal movement Undergang, in some way, must have spurred singer/bassist Martin Leth Andersen also on the front of the so-called 'unfinished business', reinforcing his creative energy and desire. to express himself with greater freedom than that granted to him by his friend David Torturdød in works such as “Aldrig i livet” or “De syv stadier af fordærv”.
Hence, the full-scale restart of Strychnos, a project dating back to the end of the nineties but only in November 2022 reached the finish line of the debut album with the appreciated “A Mother's Curse”, and which today – always under the aegis of Dark Descent – ​​is preparing to deliver a new full-length permeated with macabre and deadly atmospheres. A sound, that of the trio completed by the drummer Nis Rode Larsen (Cerekloth) and the guitarist Andreas Lynge (live member of Myrkur), placed in an intriguing death-black limbo of modernity and tradition, and which if in the first long-distance sortie was been left to flow out in a voracious and rattling way, as if to underline Leth Andersen's desire to make up for lost time, in the forty minutes of “Armageddon Patronage” it takes on a more refined, sad and controlled turn; a flow in which Death has the opportunity to be celebrated in all its fatal necessity, presenting us with a band with a very precise artistic vision and a decidedly sensitive touch despite the crudeness of the whole.
The ability to mix influences and play with nuances has remained unchanged, to the point that it continues to be not easy to cite this or that band to frame our style, the tracklist sees the rhythms slow down and the guitar work refine, while the songwriting – much more oriented towards the song form – it reflexively offers what we could define as the first, true 'hits' of the repertoire, capable of being promptly remembered for a vocal passage, a mournful melody or an incisive change of tempo.
At the moment in which they are used (see the title track or the final “Nattevandreriden”) the blast-beats certainly do not stop reaching out in considerable outbursts, but the keystone of the album is and remains an atmospheric concentration in which the doom elements and classic metal emerge insistently from the distortion, with the pace of the opener “Winds Warning the Final Storm” setting a gloomy and dramatic climate that the various “Choking Salvation”, “Pale Black Birds” and – above all – “Endless Void Dimension ”, the main song of the collection with its arpeggios, its choirs and its clean voices, makes it almost palpable when listening.
The definitive album thanks to which the Copenhagen band will establish itself within the European black/death circuit? Maybe that's exaggerated.
Certainly, an effective and evocative work, in which the Strychnos formula has been expanded and brought to important levels of elegance and character, and which those who usually follow the releases 20 Buck Spin, Profound Lore and Dark Descent (precisely), so like the fanatics of the old catalog No Fashion and Black Mark Production, he will find himself listening again on a cyclical basis. More and more personal, more and more interesting.