Year: 2024
Label: Ural Megalith
Rating: 8,6 / 10
Ural residents ВСПОЛОХ have finally begun toreceive the fruits of their long and hard work. After the strong album “Помре” in 2020, the band started touring, create new connections and rapidly gain popularity. I've seen foreigners say more than once that ВСПОЛОХ is the most outstanding of modern Russian extreme metal bands. I can agree with that. I'm repeating myself a little bit, but I can't help but note again that ВСПОЛОХ has come a long way, made an incredible qualitative leap and broke many unwritten rules. Having started as modest followers of the Kharkiv atmospheric scene, on the second album they have already developed their own personal sound with a characteristic Ural flavor, known to us from the works of КОБЬ. But what is truly surprising is the fantastically high quality of everything that ВСПОЛОХ do as a band. The sound, the performance, the image and the depth of creative thought – today all this, I daresay, is at a top-of-the-world level. Neither Candlelight, nor Wolfspell, nor Purity Through Fire, nor even Season Of Mist (if you don't take into account DRUDKH and other Roman Saenko's projects) have a band that could compete with ВСПОЛОХ. And here I must remind you that ВСПОЛОХ still work from the small middle-of-nowhere town Tulugum with ~5000 inhabitants, and that they release their records through Ural Megalith, a very underground label that they have a share in, while the undoubtedly talented hipsters GRIMA sign on Napalm Records and drive around Europe with concerts, although their new album is maybe only a half as good as "Мрьтвоземъ".
It has always been difficult for me to write about the music of ВСПОЛОХ in detail. Atmospheric metal is still based primarily on feelings, and my vocabulary on this topic has dried up since the time of DRUDKH reviews for Metallibrary. I can say that "Мрьтвоземъ", as usual, tells about various mystical Ural places through words and sounds, so you should read and listen simultaneosly. And although ВСПОЛОХ's music is extremely riff-rich for atmospheric metal, I can't underline any individual fragments for you. The compositions are very smooth, with a strong internal connection of all the parts. If you want to pay attention, for example, to the guitar, you immediately realize that the bass plays an equally important role under it, and at the moment of transition you suddenly hear that the keys have been doing something interesting all this time, and so on. Even during the solos, everything else remains active as always. Thanks in part to this intensity, the music of ВСПОЛОХ, which is mostly slow, captures all of your attention. The album only lasts 44 minutes, but it leaves you feeling like you've listened to not one, but two records. All the songs are amazing, except that the final one turned out to be a little uneven, weak in the first half. We have already heard two of them on the split about two years back.
The Ural Megalith edition turned out to be worthy of the band: it's a digibook with a 16-page booklet and Pit Art. Inside are all the texts and themed photos for them. I didn't really like the design, as all the photos are oversaturated with visual effects so much that it's hard to see anything on them. I think the original, “clean” photos would look better. Details on a video.
