ALBUM REVIEW: Blaze of Perdition - Upharsin

The sixth full length album by the Polish black metallers Blaze of Perdition is by their own admission a return to the more orthodox style of black metal after the 2020 album The Harrowing of Hearts. Like a tick list of black metal traits, it has them all covered, the growled harsh vocals of S (they only go by initials on the blurb, but a quick check of Encyclopaedia Metallum says his name is Sonnelion), the blast beats of drummer VZN, the sometimes atonal and other times melancholic guitars of XCII and M.R. (Marcin Rybichi), and the solid bass of session man Wyrd, the only thing they have missed is an unreadable logo! 

The five songs on offer here are not short, the briefest being Przel Rany (Through the Wounds) at 07:17, but they rarely become boring as the riffs intertwine, keeping you fully engaged in the music, although the lyrics sung in Polish make the vocals hard or almost impossible to understand (to a non-Polish speaker). The Album starts with W Kwiecie Rozłamu (in Ruptures Prime), a thunderous cacophony of blasters, gurgles and riffs a plenty, which is almost unlistenable, but once they slow down, the riffs become more defined, and in parts ethereal. The Stunning Niezmywalne (Indelible) is a wonderful sludgy melancholic wall of swirling riffs, and the drumming is superb throughout. The song is slightly dampened by an almost laughable part two-thirds of the way through, when it sounds like someone moaning in pain. 

Blaze of Perdition - photo by Justyna Kaminska

The album finishes with the nine-and-a-half-minute epic Młot MiecrI I Bat (Hammer, Sword, and Whip), which after a sinewy repeated guitar part finishes with a gorgeous guitar solo. The production is very clean, unlike most black metal I have heard, and this does help make the extreme parts of this more palatable, but a clean vocal now and again would help break up the gargles a bit. If black metal is your thing, you won’t be disappointed with this. It’s not my go to type of metal, so I struggled initially, but it rewards repeated listens, and after four or five plays, I was quite enjoying this.

Upharsin is released on 19th April on Metal Blade Records

Review by Andrew Matthews