This is the third full length album from the..er..enigmatic occult US trio Pact, and actually my third encounter with them too having been shredded by their ultra aggressive début The Dragon Lineage Of Satan, and pleased by the follow up groundwork on their 2014 album The Infernal Hierarchies, Penetrating The Threshold Of Night. So this is their third album, the one where hopefully all that explosive energy of a début and the solidifying second album to yield fruit. Does it?

Yeah, I reckon so. Pact have coalesced from an almost bestial breakneck metal act into a brutal, raw and aggressive blackened death metal sound. I dunno, from the first time a riff hits in ‘Dark Templar’ The size and shape of this album kinda smashed you in the mouth, steel bar subtle. Not to say there aren’t subtleties here because like all the best rabid attacks there is shape to the madness, feints and lunges from the riffs beneath the Blizzard Beast period Immortal meets Incantation punishment at high speed with a little The Tenth Sub Level Of Suicide era Leviathan and a sackful of very angry badgers. It’s unrelenting stuff, seriously. The pressure never lets up throughout, great slabs of death metal riffing slamming into the listener like a machine gun and the utterly searing howled vocals the sharp slash across the throat, particularly in my favourite track ‘The Hag And The Sleeper’.

That’s the other thing to note here. As some of the song titles suggest there is clearly a keen if malevolent intelligence work here, a serious and intense thought behind the brutality. Check out the slowly rolling build up of the unholy ‘Sorrows Embrace’ and closer ‘Of Erebus’ just to get the feel, the hint that this band are working their way into you mind even as they shatter your skull.

This is not easy. If you put this on as background music it will quickly become a wall of concrete; impermeable and featureless. It is made to be listened to properly and when you do this opens like the hospital wall in Hellraiser II and there is something rich, deep and very nasty indeed over that threshold. 

(8/10 Gizmo)

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