Gutvoid

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Band(s): Gutvoid
Label(s): Blood Harvest, Self-Released
Release Format(s): Cassette, CD, EP
Release Year: 2019
Review Date: December 15, 2019

Dec. 11th 20XX

I can’t stop drinking, downed two bottles of this cheap shit, fuck. The things I’ve seen today… Seriously, what the hell are they doing in here? There’s definitely something off with these people. Their outfits, the words they utter don’t make any sense, it’s almost like they’re from another planet…And the smell… The stench. This will never leave me I think, the place reeks of coagulated blood and fossilised excrements. I’ve seen the marks on the floor, they look like alien technology, that shit’s not human. There’s a red spot on my forearm, it’s kinda itchy too. I need to find out more, damn you R. this is all your fault.

Dec. 12th 20XX

They call themselves Gutvoid I heard, there’s just two of them but they sound like an army. Death Metal my arse, those are incantations, a ritual, these guys are dangerous. I should fuck off before they see me. What I witnessed today keeps haunting me, musical trauma. I should already be very far but something pushes me to stay. Their craft is hypnotic, like a slow dance, among the gurgling imprecations I could discern a few words:

They came dripping from the stars
Madness within form
A conjuration from beyond
Astral bestiary
They came dripping from the stars
Breaking from the void
Drawn into our world
Enslave humanity

Pretty scary prospect. I was so hooked by the guitars and bass intertwined, that I didn’t realise I was scratching so hard, my forearm was bleeding and shit, damn. Speed is not their game, but their tightness is surreal. The vocalist sounds like he is possessed by the Old Ones and he might as well be…

Dec. 13th 20XX

I passed away after 4 bottles last night. Don’t care, R. is footing the bill for this. Woke up at dawn. Black mass. Or whatever ritual that is. There’s something to be said for those really slow numbers, it feels like darkness creeping from everywhere, crawling. This is so heavy. Then it all stops and it feels like the icy guitars froze the air around the area. Then they fight for a moment until they climax and pierce the sky. Shattered, it pukes its dark entrails in a cacophony of black goo and putrid smell. I scratched all the way to my radius and started crying a bit, cowering.
They’re coming.

Dec. 14th 20XX

I don’t know where they’re taking me, they’ve been really silent. This whole trip feels like a pilgrimage. Be damned R. This place… the skulls… where am I….. (Nezu – Self-Released version, 15-12-2019)

— – – – – – – – – –

Usually I write reviews late at night, when its dark, the atmosphere is just right and i am a little drunk by just that one beer too many, so I can summon the beast within to write down the most poetic literature, yet this wayward release needs a wayward kind of approach, so i am writing this review early in the morning, painfully sober and wide awake, with all my kids running around the house. I hope I am able to create great literature again in these difficult circumstances.

Blood Harvest Records, my favourite Swedish export, besides köttbullar, spits forth “Astral Bestiary”, put on tape by the frighteningly talented Gutvoid. “Astral Bestiary” only contains three songs, shining like unworldly stars, predicting us nothing but calamity. “They Came Dripping From The Stars”!!!! …just by reading this song title, goosebumps crept up from my tailbone to my cervical vertebrae, throwing me back in time thirty years, back to this skinny, pimply teenager, reading the back of a novella written by H.P. Lovecraft for the first time; the colour out of space; the thing on the doorstep; at the mountains of madness. Those titles sparked my imagination, I just hàd to read those stories.

Gutvoid’s song titles are sparking my imagination, I have to listen to these songs.

“They came dripping from the stars” opens menacing and rhythmic, breaking into an interstellar groove so powerful, it almost causes me to dislocate my left dancing hip. “Entranced By A Frozen Dawn” is all about atmosphere and mood swings, eerie solo’s, slowly pronounced grunts draped over furious blasts. A journey that grabs you by your scruff and takes you to places you want to take a glint at through your mind’s eye yet never want to visit in your physical form. “Pilgrimage to the necropolis ruins” is propelled by the inventiveness of the guitar playing, sprinkling some poignant melancholy over this instrumental (beauty) track.

Production was handled at Mount Wexler Studio by Mister Dean, who’s also responsible for the deep, moist vocals. Delivering a clear and heavy sound that puts all instruments equipollent in the spotlights. The musicians are giving each other a lot of space to breathe and know where to hold back when the structure of the track demands it, “Pilgrimage to the …” is a fine example on how these partners in crime put themselves into the shadows only to let melancholy filter through, by putting the ingenious guitar parts on the foreground.

Gutvoid did spark my imagination, by these three prodigious observations. Astral Bestiary is spinning rounds on a daily basis in my tapedeck. Give it a try, maybe you’ll get sparked to. (Franki_boj, Blood Harvest version, 14-01-2021)

VM-UNDERGROUND

Extreme Metal Fanzine est. 2012

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Gutvoid – Astral Bestiary [EP]

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