Review by Sonny for Unaussprechlichen Kulten - Häxan Sabaoth (2024)

Well I must admit up front that this one has been a bit of a head-scratcher for me. Big fan as I am of the chilean metal scene, I have never encountered Unaussprechlichen Kulten before, despite their 25+ years on the scene, so I am unable to comment as to how typical a release for the band this is.

Häxan Sabaoth takes a long-established style of death metal and incorporates a number of other styles within that framework to construct something a little beyond the norm. The most striking aspect of the album is the lead guitar work, which often has a jangling, chiming tone and which leaps off into shred-like guitar soloing at the drop of a hat. There are certainly some killer riffs, such as the very first one you hear after the occult-sounding intro ends, which is an absolute beauty that serves to draw you into the album's meatgrinder of mayhem. This mayhem and chaotic atmosphere is where those almost demented-sounding guitar leads come in. The neo-classical-adjacent excesses of the soloing when laid down over the archetypal death metal riffs has a similar effect to my ears as disso-death, with the leads sounding out of kilter and at odds with the riffing and blasting that is going on down below. The guitars are certainly the main event here with the deeply growled vocals and, to a certain extent, the drums, being pushed down into the mix where they feel like they are acting merely as support to the six-string depravity going on in the upper echelons of the mixing board.

I have detailed the challenges I face with a lot of dissonant metal and the same issues rear their head here again in this slightly different context, making it an uncomfortable listen at times as I struggle to reconcile the lead and rhythm work. That said, this does seem to be an interesting way to insert some dissonance into a standard death metal framework, although, due to my limited knowledge of death metal, I am unsure of how rare this approach is and I would be interested to hear what true disso-death fans think of it. It could be that a release like this needs more time devoted to it than I feel able to commit to, but for me this is an album where I respect the intentions more than I enjoy the result. Don't get me wrong, it occasionally drops into a riff I can really get a hold of and then it is a really cool blast, with the later tracks such as "Dho hna formula" and "Die teufelsbucher" being the ones where this happens most often and as such providing an album that I personally feel is back-loaded.