Minnesotian blackened death dreadnaught Suffering Hour have truly constructed a masterpiece of dismal savagery with their second LP, The Cyclic Reckoning.
The Northern trio first came together back in 2011 to form a thrash band which they called As Compassion Fades. After the demise of that group and the materialization of Suffering Hour, two of the group’s members also played in the technically inclined doom band Wicked Inquisition. I will let you guess which band’s influences played a bigger role in aesthetics that Suffering Hour eventually adopted. OK, stop guessing; it was the doom metal band.
What distinguishes The Cyclic Reckoning from the outset are two stylistic choices that overlap and help give the music a strong sense of spatial awareness: psychedelic leads and reverberating feedback. These two elements indisputably fill out the body of the tracks, giving them muscle definition, and helping them expand into the space they are allotted. Each of these tracks is like a ghost whose spectral form has swelled to the point where it invades every room of the derelict house that is its tomb.
Take for example the epic sixteen-minute closer “The Foundations Of Servitude,” which begins with a squall of shrieking and undulating chords, that tumbles over and down a well of despairing, gothic melodies only to arise more fearsome than before, like the reanimated corpse of a giant sea god breaching above the surf, after having been killed and half eaten by his worshipers, to take merciless revenge upon his former flock.
The atmospheric storm that Suffering Hour conjures on The Cyclic Reckoning is not for its own sake though, but rather in service of some satisfyingly brutal blackened death metal. Tempos slither and snap at each other like cobras in a wicker basket on opener ” Strongholds Of Awakening” where a gale of death rattling grooves sweep in like an arctic hurricane on a Maimi beach, freezing partiers and sunbathers in place—transforming them into decadent ice sculptures and monuments to a degraded state of Epicureanism.
“Transcending Antecedent Visions” feels like someone slowly torturing a Siouxsie and the Banshees song with a white-hot branding tool in order to release the demonic fury caged within the marrow of its flesh prison. “The Abrasive Black Dust Part II” begins by bathing you in whimsical feedback, sounding like a Slowdive fake-out, before a dark-and-brooding, black-metal groove slices through the surface like a man escaping from the stomach of a bear by carving his way out through its abdomen.
This incursion leads to the eruption of generally more mendacious heavy metal tremolos and heedless tempo changes until the track resembles some variant of Artificial Brain attempting to single-handedly will the collapse of our solar-system’s sun.
We have had the pleasure of witnessing a number of death and black metal bands embrace a more transcendental tone with their music as of late. Some like Blood Incantation do so by looking towards metals past to create a wormhole to its future. Others like Blut Aus Nord look outside of metal altogether to siphon off rogue strands of DNA in order to promote its own accelerated mutations. With The Cyclic Reckoning, Suffering Hour has claimed the high ground between these two poles, combing the dense tenor of underground black metal and threading it with post-punk and psychedelic dismay in which to gestate a complex hybrid of technical death metal.
The elements might all be familiar, but the whole is indisputably original. If you had been intent on finding something fresh and brutal, your reckoning has arrived.
You can buy and stream The Cyclic Reckoning via Bandcamp below:
Get The Cyclic Reckoning on vinyl via Profound Lore here.
