It’s always a heady day when Septic Flesh release an album. An outfit not known for understatement-when Septic Flesh speaks, clouds break, earth shakes and a dust cloud is strewn across the horizon. All that is evil and unspeakable is unshackled and delivered with their definitive aesthetic. Septic Flesh, the name itself seems putrid in the mouth. The band is the epic defined…pregnant with abhorrence for the world, replete with foreboding and malice. When they speak, the world shudders.
Septic Flesh last work ‘Communion’ caused trembling’s on the Richter scale, such was its titan sized scope and almost unprecedented production values. It’s not often a work comes along like that which redefines just what is achievable within music, so there’s much for the band to live up to, if they’re to shore up their hard won battles.
It takes all of thirty seconds for this masterpiece (and it will be considered such) to envelop the reader in a sense they’ve managed to get themselves into a fight between Wagner and Hieronymus Bosch organised by the Industrial Age. Listening is a violent, active process and you’re engaged by something horrendously primal. They manage to tap into the part of the human psyche that makes a person gasp and recoil at some strange majesty placed suddenly before them. This must be what medieval peoples felt when they first entered a cathedral, coming from a rustic earth living to the most ornate and awe inspiring creations of the time. It presents a strange duality, where your place in the world has never felt more locked but the wildest possibilities never more easily obtainable. Here is where you come to be humbled in the hope your wishes come true.
It seems moot to discuss the musical qualities, the production and the human aspects. This is not something human made but forged by pagan gods. Timeless, peerless, this is Septic Flesh. Say hello.
9/10. You’ll like this if…You’ll just like this.
The Great Mass is out now on Season of Mist.
Reviewed by Sam Thor Rhodes.
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