Visiting the Metal Archives page for this band is a bit like reading a who’s who of Australian black metal; there’s something seriously incestuous going on with members lending their talents to Nazxul, Woods Of Desolation, Malice as well as numerous other bands. Of course this isn’t a bad thing and reading that members are involved with Nazxul (whose recent album Iconoklast you will find in my Top20 of 2009) immediately piqued my interest.
There’s not a millimetre of colour on this album cover and musically this is equally bleak. There’s something of an old school feel this album, though especially so on the opening ‘Weapon Against The Sun’ which beams at you with a kind of lo-fi Darkthronian fuzz; it’s a rather crude prelude and wastes no time with pleasantries launching straight in with some filthy vocals akin to spewing vomit and venom down a semi-blocked drain. Let down by the invisible bass, this track does sound very minimal in comparison to the rest of the album; around the two-minute mark however is slows down and seems to find its feet so to speak and all falls into place.
‘Beautiful Demise’ is driven along with a big, swaggering riff that is fattened out with some clean guitars and a layer of grimy fuzz and overall feeling of spite. Wherever this album takes you it always does it covered in a thick layer of filth and with a fetid atmosphere that certainly lends itself to pestilence. ‘With Serpents I Lay’ kicks in with a lovely chord progression and thick bass and by now the tone has really changed since the start. There’s a subterranean feel to this and you can really hear the music rising up from the fiery pits of hell, but there’s an underlying organicness beginning to emerge and the hellishness is balanced with some sweeping guitars and suave structures. ‘Of Loss And Suffering Inherit’ bubbles away with a really dark intro that kind of lays low like a dormant volcano that suddenly erupts and spews forth with a relentless battery of drums, while the guitars sound harsh yet hypnotic.
If you like you metal to sound like the aural equivalent of an outbreak of the bubonic plague then this will serve you well. If such was possible, In Memoriam, Ill Omen would surely come with the stamp of approval from Satan himself.
http://www.myspace.com/pestilentialshadows
