Following close on the heels of last year's digital-only debut album Jaundiced Hag of the Wood, Norwegian entity GRYLA make an even-stronger case for black metal supremacy with The Redeemer's Festering Carcass. Like that dark-horse debut, GRYLA's second album features a similar schematic - ripping 'n' roiling riffcraft, forward momentum whipped into a continual crescendo, tension and release waging a wondrous war - but a sound that's strangely classic and modern simultaneously. The work of one prodigiously young Torbjorn Kirby Torbo, GRYLA honor early domestic touchstones like Gorgoroth and Dodheimsgard's respective first albums as well as Kvist's lone album and Sorhin's '90s recordings whilst twisting the knife in different-yet-honorable ways. For one, Torbo's skewed melodicism nods the various schools of dissonant BM the past few decades; for another, there's often a clanging, minimal-is-maximal punkishness that reminds of Bone Awl's influential tapes or Carved Cross more recently. Put all together - and again, with RIFFS to infinity and beyond - The Redeemer's Festering Carcass breathes rotten, refreshing life in strident second-wave classicism.
