Chicago metal, underappreciated, yet undeterred. Despite receiving little to no love across the rest of this cursed land, the Second City is really second to none when it comes to spawning immensely visceral and bottom-buck-nasty musical marauders. Take blackened death metal project Blood of the Wolf, for instance. Every time they unveil a new record, it rolls off the proverbial press like a half-rendered and thoroughly shredded deer carcass plummeting onto the hood of your car from an overpass on the Dan Ryan- an ominous blast of boiling, flesh-withering blastbeats and peeling staccato riffage that is as outrightly threatening as it is cogently carnal- an externalization of a blood-starved beast's gnawing, insatiable hunger, poured through the siphon of the dialect of aural extremity. If you think you're in the mood for a band that will give you inner ear damage on a scale commensurate with an undersized detachment of lupine louts commandeering your auditory canals for their filthy pillaging and bloody contests of will, then look no further than last year's
V: Indomitable- seemingly named as a promise, and executed with enmity. Blood's brand of death metal adheres closely to the playbooks of late '90s black metal practitioners Hate and Spearhead, delivering cruel waves of relentless, unsaturated percussion, with anguished and torturous guitar grooves, and volcanic vocal performances that could make the devil himself wet his tunic in panic. The production on this album is pretty much impeccable, and the mixing is balanced and smart, leaving nothing to be desired in terms of capturing the fire and fury of the band's performance. Inside you are two wolves, and they both cower, paler than sheep's wool in the shadow of this chord-churning, chaos-courting, canis-carnivorous beast.
Indomitable, indeed.
