By Navjot Kaur Sobti

Based out of Auckland, otherwise known as a small pocket in New Zealand, Ulcerate is a band that has inflamed the scene much further than its Australian home. Initially formed as Bloodwreath by guitarist Michael Hoggard, the band has come a long way, having shared the stages with some of my personal favorites: Psycroptic, Decapitated, Suffocation, and Behemoth. Beyond their impressive touring track record, the band’s 2009 release, Everything is Fire, got a globally positive response, having been ranked as one of metalreview.com’s 100 Most Essential Albums of the Decade. Band glories aside, more on the album:

“Drown Within” kicks off the album with steadily progressing, down-tuned guitars, guttural vocals, and tons of double-bass: producing a traditional, Suffocation-meets-early-Morbid-Angel death metal feel. Amidst the brutality, “We Are Nil” and “The Earth at its Knees” keeps us on our toes, with guitar parts that are mindblowingly fast and technical, bringing to mind the inhumane technicality of Origin’s “Wrath of Vishnu.” There are multiple guitar parts, which respond to and layer one another with reasonable doses of whammy. The time signatures, which are constantly shifting, create rhythms that are complex and compel us to listen all the more closely.

While the band indeed ushers in concentrated doses of technicality and brutality, they do so without putting you to sleep. “Soullessness Embraced,” one of my favorites off of the record, is atmospheric, while retaining its heaviness. In “Caecus,” we encounter moments with melodic guitar parts that drift off beneath the slower-paced drum parts and toned down vocals: calling to mind bands as Isis and Agalloch. These atmospheric segments lend the songs an emotive, introspective feel rarely encountered in modern death metal records, and it is an element that the band incorporates as precisely as the most technical parts of tracks like “Withered and Obsolete.” The instruments function symbiotically, feeding one another to create an explosive quality that the vocals only elevate.

You can’t listen to a 30 second chunk of any track on this record and predict what the rest of it will sound like; each song is intricate and unabashed in its composition – refreshing as hell, in a day where “br00tal,” mindless metal bands cancerously replicate what’s already been done and played in the metal world.