Usurpress - _In Permanent Twilight_
(Selfmadegod Records, 2011)
by: Dan Lake (6 out of 10)
Reviewing perfectly serviceable albums of any style is downright frustrating. Praise sticks in the throat a little when a band displays competency without conspicuous ingenuity, but why? When metal has always boiled out of youth's unreasoned passion and don't-give-a-fuck aggression, withholding acclaim from records that perform their straightforward duty ignores the reasons they exist at all. (And yet here I go...)

_In Permanent Twilight_ presents 22 minutes of Uppsala Swedes Usurpress regurgitating guts into everybody's favorite putrid graves. The eight songs are solidly written, pleasantly recorded and mixed ("pleasantly"? Talk about damning with faint praise...), and wholly enjoyable while they're thumping all up in your headspace. With music as well played as this is, it's tempting to use weathered phrases like "tears death metal a new one", though nothing truly new is torn open here, so really _IPT_ "tears death metal an old one", which implies either complete inefficacy or that death metal had gotten something lodged hard up its rusty bumhole and needed a good tearing. No, best to steer clear of that image altogether.

All told, nothing on _IPT_ demands your attention, but nothing falls short of the band's chosen mark either. They throw some inventive slow-downs (most notably on "Unpunished" and "Embrace Your Non-Existence") into a generally rabid deathly stew and adeptly push all the right hair-whirling happy buttons. If you're new to the underworld of rotting, vermin-wriggling riffs then you should totally dig this up and smear it all over. The more experienced among us have this stuff somewhere in our collection already. It's not essential, but it kicks just as many teeth out as if it were.

Contact: http://usurpress.com/

(article published 13/8/2012)


ALBUMS
12/29/2012 D Lake 4 Usurpress - Trenches of the Netherworld
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