Absu - Tara

The Short: Blackened Thrash out of Texas

The Long: this is the sound of demons loading up on trucker speed and raging all night in a hotel room on the surface of a comet hurtling around the sun at 350,000 miles per hour. holy fucking hell this album is fast. both the guitar shredding and the drums are in a neck-and-neck race to see who can break the sanity barrier, however i have to award Sir Proscriptor for driving me to curl up in the fetal position on my couch due to too much exposure to sheer double-bass punishment of the most fiendish degree. you might think that an album built around such a confounding amount of speed and complexity would get "same-y" or exhausting, but i think what sets 'Tara' apart (and into Instant Classic territory) is that the attention paid to each riff, each vocal phrasing, and each blistering fill results in recognizable song structures and not just moments in which your brain can grasp onto a 4/4 time signature before the band speeds off into Nonsense Town again. there's even a much-appreciated acoustic guitar respite on track 11, giving your soul a chance to stop bleeding for 90 seconds before being thrown back into Satan's Cuisanart once again.

these otherworldly beings will be playing Maryland Deathfest in May and also have a new album coming out in a few months. good stuff to know, however i prefer to not think of Absu as just a band and rather a time in which hell's minions decided to try out "what the humans call heavy metal", resulting in 13 songs of such a deific supremacy that mere mortals can only shudder in their wake.

dl