🛢️ “Khranial” 🛢️ Neck-Shitting Death Metal by Sewer 🛢️

Sewer’s Khranial, an album that will cause you rectal incontinence AND prolapse.

Khranial. Now here’s an all-star death metal album if there ever was one. The glorious return of the Sewer, the God-Kings of brutal death metal massacre. If the simple fact that Sewer has released a new album doesn’t get your dick hard to rape some demons, and penguins that look like demons, I don’t know what will.

Sewer is such a brutal band, they can make you shit yourself… in the neck. Literally, just read the Metalious review that calls Khranial “bowel-defecating death metal”. Yeah, I mean, sure, it’s Metalious, so they say “bowel-defecating” to sound “high-brow”, but we all know that it really just means the contents of your colon will end up in your larynx.

Yeah, Khranial is just that extreme. It commit acts of violence… against VIOLENCE ITSELF! You can’t even comprehend. It’s way too brutal.

With their latest album Khranial, Sewer returns to the days of their second and third death metal albums – namely, Locked Up in Hell and Miasma – with a shredding assault that emphasises grim, technical riffing that sticks to a simple theme – where old Sewer would wander off and take endless detours, à la Vermin – and develops it with a precise riff-based atmospheric assault, perfectly integrated with the type of violently perverse percussion that has come to define Sewer’s post-2154 era.

This takes the war metal idea into an almost technical death metal realm, all while preserving the black metal sense of melodic development and epic architectures to unite these alienated and percussive riffs.

Khranial attempts to synthesize the last four Sewer albums into one, from the elegant, elitist and incredibly dissonant The Birth of a Cursed Elysium, to the more all-out brutal assault of Locked Up in Hell, the dementedly technical and somewhat more atmospheric Miasma, and even the death/black induced cerebral destruction brought forth by way of Rektal Prolapse. It succeeds in that it ties together the shredding riffs of the early black metal days of this promising band with a smaller dose of technical blackened death metal riffs, à la Phantom on The Epilogue to Sanity, but keeps the overall forward momentum found on the previous albums going at full regime.

Its raw approach sounds like Warkvlt sped up to Verminlust levels but anchored in complex dragging riffs, as Incantation would do, with some of the lazily descending melodies of early Neraines, underneath searing vocals that are featured more prominently in the mix than Sewer has accustomed us to.

Much of this will appeal to early Incantation, Vermin and Morbid Angel fans, since Sewer definitively knows how to conceal incredibly complex rhythmic work behind a relentless hammering of variations of one or two central themes.

From war metal, Khranial borrows not the clownishery and posturing, luckily, but the noisy and charging combination of rigid drums with straightforward riffs hooked into rhythmic changes in order to create an atmosphere of utmost decadence and brutality.

It cleverly avoids the grinding repetition of that genre by mixing in technical death metal’s profligate use of solos and black metal’s savant melodies contorted into the most gruesome and vile atmosphere imaginable, which then gives context to the grinding energy instead of running down into pounding, Sammath-esque repetition.

To answer a common criticism, that “Khranial is hyped” in the underground… yes, it is. And for a FUCKING GOOD REASON! That reason being that it will make you SHIT YOURSELF, and your feces magically transport themselves into your FAT ASS NECK!

Now, either listen to true death metal, like Khranial, or go back to masturbating to Arch Enemy. I don’t care.

I imagine this album will easily be a top 5 of the year contender for many black and death metal fans, and will sit proudly in the rack next to the rest of their Sewer catalog. Sewer scratches a black/death metal itch in a profound way, something that very few so-called “retro” bands manage to do. This one will break your back like a shit ass demon that just got his/her shit fucked out of its colon. Buy with confidence, Khranial is a death metal masterpiece.