With a skull garland adorning your torso, the time has come to drink from the fountains of spattering blood as we recognise the temporary nature of mortal existence. Swallow your identity, your ego and pride whilst erasing your earthly fears as you endlessly traverse through Samsara. This is what Edmonton, Alberta’s War Metal entity, Tsalal asks us to endure throughout the experience of this sophomore album, entitled ‘Adhikāra Chinnamastā’.
This Canadian duo’s musical credentials also include the likes of Black / Death / Noise / War-adjacent acts such as Bullet Clenched in Teeth, Abraxas Black, Black Abyss, Cursed Past and Brulvahnatu. The esoteric symbolism that adorns many of Tsalal’s releases places them amongst the more far out and strange entities within the modern War Metal scene. In 2020, we even witnessed the band feature on a no holds barred split release with the unstoppable Bengali War Metal duo Tetragrammacide.
This new record sees the band resuming the outrageously raw sound territories that they unearthed on their debut record and, in some respects, Tsalal manages to sound even more deliberately suffocated and obscured this time around. The record’s fiercely vibrational bass elements are so tightly compressed against the guitars and drums that it takes some considerable commitment from the listener to acclimatise to the album’s oxygen-deprived soundscape. This is War Metal that has been brought to a place of such unseen rawness that it practically induces an extraterrestrial atmosphere. Listening to the record whilst considering its savage cover art depiction makes me feel as if I am bearing witness to some sort of unspeakably violent representation of the lowest underworld. This shocking concoction successfully manages to display these terrifying godly omnipotent themes whilst sounding tribal, sacrificial and oh so bloodthirsty. With all aspects of the record’s overt presentation considered, this full-length is impressively disturbing.
Occasional lead guitar embellishments arise for the briefest of moments throughout the songs, not to deliver a semblance of a solo performance but to play out in a pattern of several dissonant notes before disappearing completely. This lead chaos seems to anchor the record’s ridiculously unpredictable bombast amongst the unceasing percussive tension and dense guitars. The raspy vocals seem to be mostly ever-present and whilst they don’t offer much in terms of variety (such is the case for all of the instrumentation here), the insanely malevolent timbre that they are delivered in keeps them disturbingly interesting enough for the record’s thirty-nine minute runtime.
Tsalal are continuing to purvey their distinct strain of ultra tribal raw War Noise on this new album and have even managed to push their depraved sound into a territory that will be even more challenging for its listeners. The experience of ‘Adhikāra Chinnamastā’ is so dehumanisingly raw that my enjoyment of it feels somewhat masochistic. I recommend this to fans of Tetragrammacide, Nirriti, Revenge and Beherit’s ‘Drawing Down The Moon’, but my major take away from this album is that it is the preserve of those who want to bear witness to the harshest of out of body musical experiences. This is punishment beyond typical extreme music perception and within that ugliness lies its very strange merits.
