FROM THE CRYPTS - CELEBRATING PAST ALBUM RELEASES in the HISTORY of HARD ROCK & HEAVY METAL…
On October 28, 2002, Immolation released their fifth full-length studio album Unholy Cult via Listenable records.
It is the band's last album to feature Alex Hernandez behind the drum kit.
Unholy Cult also saw the departure of guitarist Thomas Wilkinson and the addition of ex-Angelcorpse guitarist Bill Taylor. Steve Shalaty replaced Hernandez on Harnessing Ruin.
In his review for AllMusic, Adam Bregman was ruthless, giving Immolation and Unholy Cult no love whatsoever, stating; “Immolation sounds like an opening band. If you go to a death metal show and endure three to five bands, Immolation might be the second or third band on the bill. They've toured with some heavy hitters like Cannibal Corpse and Six Feet Under, but on their fifth album, Unholy Cult, they do nothing to raise themselves higher on the Death Metal totem pole. Ross Dolan's vocals are fine, but are not any more monstrous than your average death metal growler. Musically, Immolation's songs have a sort of flat, relentless feel to them and, like Slayer, the leads seem tacked on in the middle of a song for no particular reason. The cover art for Unholy Cult is scary, but the music inside could be a little more evil.”
While Isaiah Violante from Pitchfork gave Unholy Cult a little more credit, somewhat underhandedly stating; “I'm going to save most of the readership a lot of time and energy. If any of you are unable to distance yourselves from preconceived notions concerning the malignance of Death Metal, possess feelings of contempt and loathing for lyrics of a pointedly anti-Christian bent, or experience any cognitive dissonance vis-à-vis metal-studded wristbands and shadowy lifestyle choices, this review will be of little relevance to you. For the rest of you fine, upstanding, illuminated, and enlightened young people who are able to distinguish fantasy from reality, pat yourself on the back for being one of only a dozen or so people left on this page, and devote another one hundred and twenty seconds of your life to my ramblings.
Yonkers, New York's vicious Death Metal troupe Immolation has long been the apotheosis of consistency. Emerging from the burgeoning New York Death Metal (NYDM) scene of the late 1980s with a solid fanbase inspired by a smattering of garage quality, proto-technical demos from the band (then known as Rigor Mortis), Immolation established a raw fusion of chaotic punk and thrash built upon harmonic cacophony, blistering drums, and genuine hatred for all things Christian. Adhering steadfast to the strictures of death, destruction, and nihilism, this band has remained one of the most "popular" participants in underground death metal, bludgeoning its audience with four albums of the most relentless, alarming, brutal, (and yes, formulaic) Death Metal on record.
Immolation's newest offering, Unholy Cult continues to charter the same austere ground of their previous releases with only a modicum of artistic progression. Now encompassing unusual hybrids of Heavy Metal, Death Metal, and Black Metal with shifting allegorical phrasing, breakneck tempos, and trudging funeral dirges, Unholy Cult is an album that will please the band's devoted cultish fanbase without necessarily turning the heads of anyone else.
In tracks like Sinful Nature, a juggernaut of seething madness and brute force, the guttural vocals of singer/bassist Ross Dolan-- his style having always stood in contrast to the less refined howling of other Death Metal vocalists-- help erect a typically self-contemptuous landscape. While he bellows lines like, "How can we live with ourselves/ Our jealousy, our tyranny/ The lives we make, the lives we take/ The fools we serve, the fools we are," drummer Alex Hernandez rips through exhausting combinations of blastbeats and double-kick licks. Meanwhile, guitarists Tom Wilkinson, Bill Taylor, and Robert Vigna create layer upon layer of absurdist riffs and hellish noise dangling on the brink of disorder. Immolation builds to these moments of pseudo-chaos effectively throughout Unholy Cult, and degenerating tidal waves of noise back to repetition and melody has always been their strong suit.
The most avant-garde offering from Immolation's latest disc comes in the form of Rival the Eminent, a 5\xBD-minute foray into an amalgam of speed metal's scorching pace and black metal's purified melody and rhythm. Moving through heroic pathos lyrically and instrumentally-- brought to a head by a searing solo guitar lead roughly halfway through-- Rival demonstrates all shades of Immolation without ever becoming tiresome or predictable. Sludgy bass and kickdrums are drilled into the listener's head with such abandon and persistence that it's simply impossible to ignore. This brand of repetition serves in a similar capacity to the high frequency assault of power electronics groups; tones and phrases are so unavoidable that the listener's synapses can't help but be altered by the sheer power of Immolation's attack.
For much of the Death Metal community-- many of whom have existed in a catatonic state for the past fifteen years-- this disc will be precisely the panacea they've been looking for: a stirring indictment of Christian dogma and guilt buried within a lobotomizing wall of chromatics and dissonance. Unholy Cult is ferocious, loud, and technically and tactically precise. Alas, for those of you too undiscerning to comprehend the difference between schlock and shock, this album will probably confirm all of your worst suspicions about Death Metal: the racist, irreligious, and unflinchingly juvenile champion of the underground. But, because it doesn't display a significant thematic progression or a desire to pander to a wider audience, this album doesn't try so much to allay your fears as it does to prey upon them, and for that there should be some rejoicing."
Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells
Comments