Ulthar - Cosmovore

I stumbled across not so much Ulthar, but the cover art for their upcoming debut album, Cosmovore here, on Bandcamp a month or so ago. I’ve had pretty good luck with finding cool albums through picks based on how cool the cover art was, and I was eager to find out what kind of music the band were going to bring forth to represent the horrendous, nightmare-ish monster(s) gracing the album cover
Blending the unlikely elements of depressive atmospheric black metal a la Wolves in the Throne Room or Leviathan with the rapid-fire sci-fi death metal of bands like Revocation or even Suffocation, Ulthar do construct an at least somewhat unique experience with Cosmovore. The band do, however, still seem to be in that creative stage of finding out exactly what mark they want their music to make with both of these styles on metal as a whole, and there are several points across the track list where the band are rather transparently channeling their influences more than their own artistic inspiration. It’s a tough thing for many bands to pin down on a debut, but it’s something worth addressing going forward if Ulthar really want to establish a stylistic identity for themselves with these two subgenres as the main components. And the band do pull together some impressive moments of genre-blending fury on the album worth pointing to to expand on.
The quick death metal riffing and black metal tremolo-picked atmosphere on songs like the opening title track and “Solitarian” do well to showcase the band’s performative talents across ever-shifting cosmic landscapes that are as interesting as they are frustrating. While the compositions do work in a plethora of riffs and intricate blast beat rhythms, the album’s atmosphere becomes a bit homogeneous not too deep into the track list. That’s not to say there aren’t thrills to be found like the tight riffage on “Asymmetric Warfare” and the dynamic shifts on “Infinite Cold Distance”. The epic 13-minute closing track, “Dunwich Whore” provides kind of a worthwhile example of the band at their most elongated. They don’t sound spread thin or diluted, they just stretch their writing over a longer time period. And it’s a decent way to finish the album, but it kind of shows that the band need to spend more time working out the kinks in their style before just making a massive track like this one with an incomplete machine.
Overall, Cosmovore does strike a little bit of new iron across its 40-minute run time,  The band do seem to have kind of a sense of direction on their debut, here, but it does still, in quite a few places sound indeed like a prototypic debut. But where the kinks are in the band’s sound are completely visible and fixable, and I’m sure they can manage to more cohesively integrate their unique amalgamation of sounds with some tenacious focus on the task at hand.

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