Arising from the ashes of Morphosis, Dubliners (no not them) Apostate Viaticum have delivered a right tasty slab of crushing old school DM on this, their debut album.
Now although this is a debut album, this band are not a bunch of young pretenders. Apostate Viaticum have a number of Irish extreme metal veterans in their ranks and, from the promo pics at least, look like Master meets Deviated Instinct. This is a potent album of riff dominated thrashing death that locks on to you immediately and was the perfect follow up to the album I’d been writing up previously. Their apparent influences would appear to be bands such as the aforementioned Master, early Slayer & Sepultura and Sadus with the spite ridden vocals being pure Mille circa “Terrible Certainty”.
Obviously there are a ton of bands out there with the same influences but Apostate Viaticum (bit of a mouthful that name lads) have a certain freshness to their sound and there’s a controlled eagerness of menace to songs like “Bastards Of Cain” and “Moloch The Sanguinary” that you don’t hear often enough these days. The guitar tone is spot on and the drums have an excellent ‘live’ sound to them. The production here is faultless with a really organic sound to the band with all the instruments having space to breathe without having that compressed sound so commonly found in metal these days.
Every track here is strong with its own identity and it’s difficult to pick a stand out. If you like long epic and doomy then the title track will blow your skirt up. If you want fast, savage and aggressive then album closer “Beckoned By The Callous Dead” will part your eyebrows nicely!
This is some really tasty stuff and its quality is no doubt due, in part, to the maturity and experience of the musicians involved. Well done to Invictus Productions for picking the band up. This is a cracking debut and I have no doubt that Apostate Viaticum are gonna go places.
(9/10 Mark Eve)
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