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REAPER
The Atonality Of Flesh

Iron Bonehead Productions (2021)
Rating: 8/10

The Atonality Of Flesh is Reaper’s second full-length studio album, and I’ve been waiting for this bomb to drop for a while, having been a huge fan of this Swedish duo since their 2018 demo Ravenous Storm Of Piss.

Embarking upon ghastly black / speed adventures straight from the cold crypts of Hell, Reaper isn’t out to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they rip it off the vehicle and throw the tyre onto the fire with impure Bathory grimness produced straight from tin-can city.

Opener ‘Dogs Of The Crumbled Firmanent’ is a blistering hell crash of percussive fury and mayhemic destruction, mixed with spiteful vocal spits and blizzards of nastiness. Admittedly, Reaper does nothing new and without the clanking stuffy heyday of Bathory and black metal first waves this stuff wouldn’t exist, but I’m so glad that it does – the gruesome twosome constructing fragile walls of scintillating speed and blackened gnarliness.

‘The Sweetness Of The Wound’ is volatile and vicious, with the instruments a mesh of barbaric sickness and rust-coated recklessness. And that’s how the record flows – fast-flowing streams of piss and blood channelled into fiery pits of Hades.

‘Saturn Devours’ is one of my personal favourites on offer, with its horrid guitar tone that blisters and splinters bones fragments producing a wailing wall of chaos and cacophony. Meanwhile, ‘Piss, Bile And Violence’ (why didn’t they call the album this?) is typically rank in its violent thrashing, with the vocals the usual scratchy snarls of derision and mockery wrenched from Quorthon Seth’s soul.

At six-minutes, ‘Piss, Bile And Violence’ is maybe a tad too long. In fact, the whole album at just under 40-minutes could’ve done with being ten-minutes shorter just to give it a snappier, more abrupt feel, but one can’t argue with feisty delights such as ‘Come Nature, Come Cruelty, Come Death’ with its furnace punk rawness.

Elsewhere, ‘Architecture Of The Flame’ is a harrowing rust-bucket brim with wailing guitars and hammering drum pistons – the black smoke billows greatly on this tune. And such hammering of horns continues with the sizzling ‘Thru With You’ and the caustic vibrations of ‘Rise Epimetheus’. The latter is surely the album’s slowest yet most evil moment, where the vocals ooze with black menace to a doomy trudge of goblin shit as the guitars and drums rattle with equal nuisance.

‘Rise Epimetheus’ is the track that gets me craving Reaper at their doomiest, even if just for the sake of variety, so I hope with future releases they bring more slower passages of morbidity to the table. But for now, the band’s second opus still whizzes by at a frenzy and so several listens are required in order to soak up the scathing blasphemy.

I knew what was coming with The Atonality Of Flesh, but it certainly solidifies Reaper’s place in the anarchic archaic halls of black thrash nastiness, so I’ll be very interested to see where the next album takes them… as more of the same may just not be enough.

Neil Arnold

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