With a name like Shuriken Cadaveric Entwinement you know this could only ever be the nastiest form of underground death metal… and so it proves. Pitched as something of a side-project from Lust of Decay’s Jay Barnes and Jordan Varela, Constructing The Cataclysm is a much stronger album than you’d generally expect from a ‘second string’.
Lust of Decay hail from North Carolina, and Shuriken Cadaveric Entwinement deliver an unadulterated death metal onslaught in the traditions of Deicide, among numerous others. Fully 10 years on from Shuriken Cadaveric Entwinement’s second album, Resuscitating The Vile, many had probably thought the band had been swallowed whole by somekind of death metal cesspit but multi-instrumentalist Varela and vocalist Barnes are back to prove otherwise.
Barnes’ bark is worse than his bite as he lunges into album opener ‘Insurrection of the Diabolical,’ which kicks things off in imposing fashion, forcing you to take shelter from the full-on hailstorm of primal blastbeats and fuzzed up riffs.
Without so much as dropping a beat, the duo crash headfirst into the demonic-like ‘Breaching the Gates of Tranquility’ which revolves around a hook that will gouge your eye out as soon as look at you. Shuddering stuff.
Drawing inspiration from the mythology around the mighty samurai warrior, Shuriken Cadaveric Entwinement channel their Eastern enthusiasm by summoning the spirit of the Oni, and tales of gore-filled fights to the death that provide the perfect battleground for the likes of pulsating rhythmic rollercoasters such as ‘Irrevocable Siege of the Abominable’.
Shuriken Cadaveric Entwinement may not be reinventing the wheel with their festering fragments of OSDM, but that matters not a jot. If you like your toast buttered this way up then these boys will deliver, spinning the death metal detritus into a putrid pile once more on ‘Insidious Spiritual Incarceration’, complete with hellish cries and more skull crushing blastbeats than can possibly be good for you.
The closing title track is the longest of the eight songs at just shy of five minutes. Opening with a few flesh-ripping cries, the pandemonium is not kept at bay for long, Barnes at his glass-guzzling best as he furiously spews forth his lyrics against a rumbling backdrop of searing riffs and an incessant percussive onslaught. A 10-year wait maybe, but the ultimate lava licks from North Carolina assuredly make their mark.
Constructing The Cataclysm is released via Comatose Music on 5 August
Review by Paul Castles
