My quest for the wildest, balls-to-the-wall Blackened Death Metal album continues this week with a band from Bahrain called Zvindiyar, and their brand-spanking debut EP Six Rites.
Straight away, I can tell I’m going to be blown away; the opening track, “Anqa,” bursts from the speakers like a rhinoceros on Crack. It’s got it all figured out with a sort of Fear Factory-ish vocal delivery, and the music itself is reminiscent of Fear Factory’s best album, Demanufacture. The clean vocals battle for dominance against the growling, and it all coalesces in a powerhouse of an opening song.
“Hex Of The Frenzied Decay” brings in the Blackened aspect, and holy fucking shit, this is mesmerizing. Effortlessly brutal, but within the brutality there’s a sense of beauty that cannot be ignored. You’ll see what I mean when you listen to it. It’s brooding, yet blistering at the same time, making for a brilliantly delivered wall of death, think, like, Onward to Golgotha or something in that vein, and you’ll be in the right neighborhood.
According to the presser, the band leans heavily into their Persian and Arabic backgrounds, creating some ultra-brutal World Music that has to be heard to be believed. This is a whole other level of Folk Metal insanity, trust me, you need to hear this album.
“The Soaring Enigmatic” is a massive one. The mid-paced bits are interspersed with moments of unhinged brutality and raw emotions. Zvindiyar have moments where they blast and thrash their way through the boundaries of Hell (there are a few scattered riffs and tonal shifts that will remind you of Slayer. Spoiler alert: they’re there, but I’m not going to point them out.)
“Fell” is the slammer here. Knuckle-dragging riffs interspersed with moments of insane violence and one breakdown after another, it’s like Suffocation and Internal Bleeding showed up to lend some neck-snapping destruction and then split directly after.
“الهمس الأول” is an instrumental with some soft, spoken words in the background. It sets up the big ending, which comes in the form of “Shadhavar”. This six-minute epic is worth the wait, blasting out of the gate; it weaves through tempo changes with ease, and it’s a punishingly beautiful song. The perfect way to close out Six Rites, and I love it all. This is too fucking good to pass on.
Zvindiyar has hit it out of the park with Six Rites. This is a complex album, melding technical brutality with subtle ambience that comes creeping in when you least expect it. I hope they have nothing but total success in the future. If you like Fear Factory, Suffocation, and Internal Bleeding, but with some Blackened influence to boot, then you know what you need to do. Go get this album now!
