Every so often, I find myself wondering what appeals to me about music that’s utterly bleak. The world’s an unsteady, stressful place, and anxieties abound from every angle. Yet any time some new project markets itself as dour and miserable, my pupils widen, my eyebrows raise, and my curiosity is piqued. Maybe it’s just a matter of looking for catharsis? Whatever the case may be, when Relapse Records announced the coming of Malthusian‘s The Summoning Bell, which was promised to be a pitch-black take on death metal, I hopped to attention. That first single was so doomy and heavy, and that cover art was so gloomy (not to mention distinctly Irish) that I knew this was another dose of dread I’d have to take.
I’ve been aware of Malthusian for a good while, given dark, caverncore death metal was my bread and butter as a younger metalhead, but The Summoning Bell marks the first time I gave the Dublin-based band a try. True to their promise, Malthusian‘s sound is a very dark, old school take on death metal. Their roots aren’t hard to trace, blending the churning tumult, propensity towards doom, and harmonic squeals of Incantation with the more otherworldly, technical, and occasionally dissonant approach of Morbid Angel. Add on a suffocating, blackened atmosphere, and you’d have a pretty solid grasp on how Malthusian operates.
They’re also a band that knows how to take their time. Sans the extended, desolate intro and interlude tracks “Isolation” and “The Onset of the Death of Man” (respectively), the songs across The Summoning Bell run anywhere from five and a half minutes to just shy of sixteen. Song structures are loose and flowing, and the tempos are prone to change at the drop of a hat. “Red, Waiting” serves as an excellent microcosm of the entire album past it, beginning at a doomed trudge that shifts in and out of more aggressive charges before a brief silence ushers in a bleak closing march. It doesn’t reveal all of Malthusian‘s tricks right off the bat, but it does a great job letting the listener know what they’re in for.
That said, The Summoning Bell does feature a solid amount of internal variety even if it’s very consistent in approach. The title track leans far heavier on the band’s doomy tendencies, while “Between Dens and Ruins” kicks off on an almost thrashy note and spends much more of its runtime on blast beats and tremolo riffs. In particular, I feel like “Eroded into Superstition” stands as a personal favorite due to its more technical, spidery intro and the acrobatic bass work lurking below the guitars before the surprising and legitimately cool shift into dramatic orations as the song winds down.
And then there’s the monolith that is “Amongst the Swarms of Vermin”, which once again makes great use of the bipartite structures Malthusian deploys fairly often. The first half of the song is utterly crushing, rolling along with the crawl and heaviness of an overburdened tank beyond a surprisingly airy progression kicking up around two minutes in and an acceleration a couple minutes later. The back half, again signposted by a drop to atmospheric near-silence, rips into being with furious wailing leads and maintains a blasting pace for practically its entire remaining seven minutes. Tack on the dread-inducing slow build chord sequence of “In Chaos, Exult”, and The Summoning Bell‘s protracted final charge is truly something to behold.
During my first couple spins, I did wonder if the songs across The Summoning Bell bled together too often, but after several listens the band clearly does a great job of differentiating each song from its brethren. It’s just such a churning maelstrom of an album, not to mention a decently lengthy one, that parsing everything can be taxing at first. But it’s an album well worth giving time to grow on you. As murky as the mix is, I had probably listened to The Summoning Bell five separate times before realizing just how nimble the bass work is. The guitars and drums, however, are outstanding from the start, and the vocals across the album are just harrowing, be it resonant growls, harsh rasps, or the dramatic, sermon-like shout that closes out “Eroded into Superstition”. It’s a lot to take in, and it’s utterly dreary, but damned if Malthusian doesn’t make it worth the listener’s while.
The Summoning Bell is a taxing, dreary album. The songs run long and evoke every shred of misery and desolation that the band promised during the hype cycle. Depending on the listener’s mood, it may prove impenetrable at first impression. But Malthusian weaves in plenty of musicality and diversity within the din to keep you coming back and getting drawn deeper and deeper into their mordant tumult. Their spin of death metal is exceedingly dark, but they do that approach justice, and The Summoning Bell stands as one of the more gripping death metal albums I’ve heard this year. I can only hope that whatever Malthusian does next will come soon. It isn’t like things aren’t getting darker out there anyway, you know?
