The Occult - Omega
Someone once told me in an interview that the good trends ought to be referred to as movements, and when it comes to the current Converge-meets-Entombed Hardcore boom spearheaded by the likes of Trap Them and Black Breath, I couldn’t agree more. It seems this trend movement is unstoppable, now proven to have the long-range ballistic capability to pervade Mother Russia. Somehow Russian Hardcore just sounds more hardcore than any other type of Hardcore. You try doing the pick-up-change in one of those huge, furry coats! Given the genre-defying quirks and oddball nature that so many of Russia’s extreme music exports have had in the past, The Occult just might be the most focused and dead serious group of individuals that side of the pond since the KGB. The Deathwish and Southern Lord camps may want to take note: as far as addictive combinations go, The Occult’s pairing of Jane Doe and Wolverine Blues is right up there with cocaine and baking soda. It’d be downright foolish for anyone to deny the Converge influence abound on Omega. That crazed intensity is evident right off the bat on opener “Reflection,” with its relentless spasms of tension and release, jagged breakdowns, and feedback-drenched, zombified Sludge riffs. Fatal circle-pit histrionics ensue on the raging sneak-attack of “Blind Flock,” the angst-ridden groove of “Ode to Death,” the D-beatdown of “Love Is the Only Truth,” and the All Out War/Arkangel stomp of “Dead Hopes,” while “Path ov the Damned II,” “Iscariot,” and the title track serve as the slow(er)-burning Death ‘n’ Roll conduits for Entombed’s festering slime. It can be argued that Dima’s vocals are little more than a serviceable-yet-basic Jacob Bannon impersonation, but his go-negative-or-go-home lyrics are much better read than dead. With the nanosecond-long attention span of most folks today, this Swedeathcore uprising may already be old news, but The Occult do it as well as anyone.
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