Gevurah - Sulphur Soul

Gevurah follows up 2016′s debut full-length with a four-track EP that compounds upon the band’s bold statement of epic black metal two years earlier. The 31-minute EP provides a quality overview of what made Hallelujah! so enthralling. As grand and accomplished as Hallelujah! was, Gevurah seem keen to improve upon it, and on Sulphur Soul they sure as fuck have. I was honestly not expecting much more than an addition to the band’s catalog consistent with what they came through with on their debut, something to maintain interest. I was not expecting to get my favorite black / blackened death metal release of the year. Gevurah put in the fucking work on this one.

The first song on the EP, the nearly seven-minute “The Putrid Stench of Rotting Flesh”, sounds as cinematic and fantastical as I have ever heard black metal sound, yet avoids stepping over that line into corniness. I think immediately of Watain’s earlier work and how they were able to capture this massive aura with death metal-influenced black metal and cultivate a seriously menacing presence. Gevurah achieve a similarly remarkable feat here while creating a slightly more ethereally spiritual (though no less dark) atmosphere, rather than one of pure occultism. It’s a tremendous start to the album and an epic addition to Gevurah’s catalog.

“Across the Primordial Sea” follows with more of the same, which is hardly anything to complain about. It’s another well-organized composition full of howling vocals, cavernous guitar dissonance that takes the atmospheric quality of the guitar work similar to that of Wolves in the Throne Room and blends it with the fire of something like that of Gorgoroth, and blast beats and tom-heavy fills that accent the empty spaces perfectly rather than distract. The dynamic the band works with near the track’s exit resembles the refined spiritual black metal Nergal has worked so hard to sculpt in his long artistic path, and Gevurah seem to have mastered it in their relative creative infancy.

Speaking of Nergal, the Behemoth influence seems to kick up a bit on the more more blackened death metal approach of the third track, “Mark of Lucifer”, especially in the vocal department, which finds the band utilizing more aggressive shouts rather than howls, as nergal often did on Behemoth's 2014 masterpiece. Here, Gevurah prove they aren’t content to simply pump out more of what’s comfortable or just what’s proven to work. Instead, the band up the metallic intensity and showcase the span of their expertise.

The album wraps up with the sprawling “Black Sun Thaumiel”, which shows the band making the most of the time they take on the song’s nearly 11-minute run time. Finishing with a climactic shower of blast beats and divinely blackened guitar riffage, even the long, drawn-out concluding section of the song does well to retain the dynamic and integration of new ideas to keep the atmosphere of the song and album interesting rather than stagnant, and it helps finish the album off on a note as grandiose as possible. Fuck, this is a good album!

Despite just breaking the half-hour mark, Sulphur Soul manages to pack a more moving black metal punch than most, if not all the black metal I’ve heard this year. They have kind of beaten Watain at their own game this year, an unusually mild year for Watain though in my opinion, and set the bar incredibly high for Behemoth to hurdle over when I Loved You at Your Darkest comes out this Friday. But Gevurah don’t simply ride their contemporaries’ coattails and I don’t want to write about this album as though that’s all it’s doing. With Sulphur Soul Gevurah are carving themselves a niche within one of black metal’s most elite ecosystems, and they are doing so not by way of gimmicks or imitation, but with hard-worked proficiency and a poignant display of a sharp composing prowess that most bands at their age are nowhere near. As much as this has excited me for what Gevurah have in store on their next LP, this album is much more than just a hold-over or a taster. Sulphur Soul is a powerful expansion upon the finest elements of Gevurah’s sound, and one that foreshadows a hopefully bright future with a showcase of purely immodest excellence. Goddamn, Gevurah! Well fucking done!