The band is listed as a blackened death metal band, but honestly, I don’t really notice black metal in their sound. Yeah, there’s some keyboards and shit thrown around a bit like on “Devilish Prophecies”, but that’s about it. Anyway, back to this song. Reworked a bit from their demo, this tune is one of the strongest songs on this album. Starts doomy, slow doomy, with a bit of an old Autopsy tinge, even in the faster gallop that erupts.

Let me digress a bit…I dig their organic sound. The guitar tone is actually warm and not processed. Anyway, the song picks up a faster-paced speed, and Oleg Malleus has a good set of pipes. For reference purposes, he does a pretty nailed-down version of David Vincent, from the third and fourth legendary Morbid Angel albums, when Vincent’s voice went a tad deeper and more gruff. There are a variety of tempo shifts with a Morbid Angel style to some of the bendy guitar chords, and the keys towards the back end of the song add some creepy ambience. Excellent song.

Let’s rewind back to the beginning, and the opening intro is rather long, at over two minutes, with the synths and atmosphere. It’s ok, but nothing spectacular that’s gonna knock you on your ass. Epitome of Fear comes forth with a killer isolated guitar riff. The song picks up the pace, then slows back down to a mid-paced, similar in style to Bolt Thrower. This part with the riffage and double bass is most excellent. Lots of tempo shifts to spin your little head around. Really cool song. It would have been neat for that intro to have started and been only a few seconds, starting low, then sped up and louder, and gone right into this song with that opening isolated riff…would have owned.

https://youtu.be/uxw7yERe_ac?si=J2z9T1VbMqm0vr_K

I always say, know your metal history, and Void Monuments forgot that part with the song “Decapitate the Saints”. “Decapitated Saints” was a killer song on Vader’s great debut album, The Ultimate Incantation, released decades ago. Regardless, there’s an ambience to the buildup, and then the mid-paced opening has a guitar solo over it. Neat! The song has a nice jumpy riff, during the slower moments, with really cool vocals and growls. The song picks up the pace, and when I have said that before, the pace never gets into blast beat territory on the album. We are talking about more of a classic, death metal speed of the late 80’s, early 90’s. Almost death thrashy, but 100% death metal. This song has more slower moments, and the doom is evident in certain sections.

“Father of Sin” ends the album has slower, doomier passage,s and the gallop, fairly early on, is terrific. The band has a pretty decent rhythm section going for them, and this song is one of the best on the album. The mid-paced, slower moments and galloping sections work great, without the faster parts. So I am glad they left those parts outta the song.

Posthumous Imprecation is a gnarly little death metal album from Void Monuments. With a classic type of album cover design, calling to mind the death metal years of yore, this is a well-done debut album. It’s tough finding bands with originality these days, because there’s literally like a billion extreme metal bands. Void Monuments, though, play their music with conviction ,and I love this older style of death metal so much. The band hit the mark with the production on this. Good stuff!

In fact, it was actually my recent review of the 4 Doors to Death II split that made me aware of the band at all, as Obscene‘s vocalist, Kyle Shaw, lent his wildly torturous and pained vocal talents to a few tracks for Fetid Zombie‘s inclusion on said split. The man’s take of Martin Van Drunen (Pestilence/Asphyx/ Hail of Bullets) mixed with Chris Reifert (Autopsy) and  cranked to eleven, is for most, a love ’em or hate ’em type of  thing. Personally, I love ’em. The distressed and wounded howls Shaw emits are poignantly bloodcurdling as well as being seemingly capable of inducing a violent madness, much like nails being scraped on a chalkboard has the ability to do. While it doesn’t really sound very appealing, I can assure you that it works quite well, especially when paired with the late ’80’s/early ’90’s thrashing death metal mixture of the Netherlands and the good ol’ U. S. of A.

Ripping out of the gates from the get go, album opener, “Without Honor and Humanity” wastes zero time in getting down to whooping a little ass. Like a deadly combination of Possessed, Sadus, Obituary, and Asphyx, the track manages to do quite a bit of damage in under three minutes. Hell, they even throw in a classic screamin’ eagle divebomb; you know what I’m talking about, the soaring note bend that the likes of Kerry King, Rick Rozz, and Allen West like to begin and end their solos with, and a lot of the time would consider it a solo unto itself.

Much of the album’s seven remaining tracks play out in a similar fashion, as the band expertly weaves juxtaposing riffage of tremolo picking and slower engorged chords of crushing death, à la Asphyx or Hail of Bullets, or even Bolt Thrower, with a somewhat jaunty or thrashiness. While every track on The Inhabitable Dark stands shoulder to shoulder with one another in an extremely enjoyable presentation, it’s “Black Hole of Calcutta” and album closer and title track, “The Inhabitable Dark” that standout for me the most; probably because it is on these two songs that Obscene focus a bit more on the midpaced and slower moments than on any other of the album’s tracks.

It’s in these moments that the band really stands out and focuses on driving that heavy metal spike of riffage into your cranium in a most effective way. The former hitting like a Hail of Bullets styled panzer, rolling over and flattening your already bruised, battered, and bloody wartorn body, while the latter, and my favorite track of the album, is a spectacularly  solid crushing dirge of doom riddled death metal. A bit more ominous and moody in its slower main riffage, the song really is propelled by the ever driving and pummeling kick drums as much as the actual guitar riffs themselves. The track’s ending quickly morphs and fades into a simple, yet highly effective, piano outro that simultaneously, manages to be creepy and foreboding, as well as retaining just a hair of an attractive melody.

There’s no doubt that The Inhabitable Dark is quite the ripper. Granted, it does all start to bleed into itself by the album’s end, but at being just shy of thirty-three minutes in length, it doesn’t really factor into anything negative for the band or album.

While I’ve thrown around the names of Asphyx and Hail of Bullets a couple of times in this review, it is really in the sounds of Trenchrot and their sole full-length album, Necronomic Warfare, that Obscene reminds me the most of and tends to conjure up throughout the enitirety of The Inhabitable Dark. Of course to be fair and honest, it was Trenchrot who in turn was like a rawer little brother to the aformentioned Asphyx/Hail of Bullets/Bolt Thrower sound, and with three out of those four bands having split-up and called it quits, Obscene manages to find themselves in a most perfect spot to appeal and claim many of those band’s fans as their own. I know that they have got me on board, and I immensely look forward to seeing where the group goes from here.

What Hellish do is pay tribute to a lot of bands of the aforementioned heyday of thrash. Hellish has a more malevolent sound from those bands of the past but the atmosphere is still there, also there is big influence of Kreator circa the Endless Pain era. I mention this because there is that darkness in their sound, listen to the vocals of Necromancer and you hear a more evil Mille, with his bass sound rumbling in the background along with the guitars, that are like razors like cutting thru the speakers and suitably chaotic in the solos and with touches of black metal tonality.

The lone instrumental “Arrival of Satan, gives a good demonstration of Venom worship, the drums have that 1-2, 1-2 pacing of early Sodom. In the production, I hear a  small bit of early Darkthrone which adds a touch of blackness to the proceedings. Even in the band pictures you see some Morbid Visions era Sepultura, the CD artwork is dark and ominous which is a welcome diversion from the goat/tank/bullet and horns from typical albums of this genre.

Yeah, the sound is sort of one dimensional and there is not any new ground being explored here but you should know what you’re getting when you buy or even read into what Hellish have to offer, it’s straight and to the point, it’s powerful, it’s dark and it’s a Ep and for a $1 off Bandcamp you can’t go wrong with this bit of good thrashing fun.