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LEFT CROSS
Upon Desecrated Altars

Profound Lore (2023)
Rating: 6.5/10

Returning after a six years since their 2017 debut album Chaos Ascension, Richmond, Virginia-based noise beasts Left Cross make up for lost time by battering you to death within minutes.

This is not a pleasant experience due to its unrelenting hammering, which is made all the more overwhelming by a boggy production that doesn’t necessarily aid them in their quest for total annihilation. Upon Desecrated Altars runs for 35 minutes yet seems short on ideas and at times comes across as rather repetitive, and I just don’t have the patience.

After a short instrumental intro (‘Debellation’) you get blasted by nine brutal tracks of war-fuelled death metal whereby all instruments and voice merge as one great boiling furnace that combines Immolation and bestial blackened war noise. It’s ugly, brutish, violent and uncompromising from the off with the ultra violent drafts of ‘The Blood Of Mars’, through the hellish swarm of ‘Burning Raids’, to the hyper tension of the title track and culminating in the gnashing bleakness of ‘Celestial Wound’.

There is little time for deviation, no room to breathe, and by the end you are seeking a touch of Electric Light Orchestra’s ‘Mr Blue Sky’ to take the edge off. Left Cross sound seriously pissed off; tracks like ‘Unhallowed Oaths’ and ‘Inexorable March’ are songs to drive tanks to.

Left Cross are the guys that will fight among themselves long after the war is over and their brand of tormented angst is not one I’m always comfortable with, but then again if their aim was to force a submission after a few seconds then they have most certainly achieved that. Now, who is gonna clean all that blood up?

Neil Arnold

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