One minute you’re minding your own business, maybe having a cup of tea (my fellow Brits, I’m looking at you), when a band just sort of lands in your lap and proceeds to alter your brain chemistry. Vermont’s Ordh are one such band.
‘Blind in Abyssal Realms’ is a beautiful beast, inside and out. From the mind bending and brutal opener ‘Apis Bull’, the time and devotion that has been put into this record is evident. Fans of Opeth and Incantation alike have plenty to play with here, Ordh manage to maintain a sound that is aggressive and yet sophisticated, mixing Death Metal and Progressive Metal without coming across as pretentious. 70’s style proggy, technical solos intertwine with guttural vocals and violent drumbeats for long periods of time; but it never feels unnecessarily drawn out, and there are some rather lovely gentle instrumental moments scattered throughout. At forty-three minutes long with only five tracks, Ordh strike a balance that keeps the listener interested without outstaying their welcome.
Title track ‘Blind in Abyssal Realms’ can only be described as an odyssey, it seemingly covers everything the band set out to try on this album and is the song I would tell you to check out if I could only recommend one.
Ordh have crafted a cerebral, cavernous monster of a debut and I suspect we will be seeing them on many AOTY lists. (Chantelle)
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Ordh’s debut ‘Blind In Abyssal Realms’ is not the easiest record to get into, and I mean that in a good way. There is a lot happening across these five tracks, but it does not feel like the band are desperately trying to prove how complicated they can make a Death Metal record. The songs take their time, move through different moods and keep throwing little details into the arrangements without completely losing the heavier side of the music.
The guitars are where I kept finding myself coming back. Graham Brooks has clearly spent a lot of time working on these riffs because there is plenty of detail in them, but they still have weight. You get those crooked, strange passages sitting next to much more direct Death Metal riffing, and every now and then something almost melodic appears before the band drags you somewhere darker again. There is a progressive element here, but it does not turn the whole thing into a sterile musicianship showcase.
That is probably what I like most about the album. Even when the songs become complicated, they still sound like a Death Metal band. ‘Apis Bull’ gets things moving without giving you the entire picture straight away, while ‘Moon Of Urd’ starts opening up more of the band’s atmospheric side. By the time you get into ‘Phlegraean Fields’, which stretches past ten minutes, the amount of movement becomes much more obvious, but the song does not feel like it is simply changing riffs because the band can.
The vocals from Jonathan Hébert keep the record grounded. They are deep, harsh and heavy enough to stop the more adventurous guitar work from taking the album too far away from its Death Metal foundation. I also like that the vocals are not constantly pushed to the front of the mix. There is enough going on instrumentally that doing so would probably have made the record tiring.
Dylan Blake’s drumming is another reason the longer songs work. There is plenty of technical playing, but it does not come across as someone desperately trying to fill every available second with a drum fill. The changes are tied into the riffs, and Joshua Smith’s bass gives the whole thing some additional weight. You can actually hear the bass instead of having it disappear underneath the guitars, which is always a welcome thing on a record this busy.
The synths are probably the element I was most curious about, and Hannah Hoffman’s contribution is handled pretty well. They appear when they are needed and add atmosphere without turning the album into some keyboard-heavy progressive metal exercise. There are moments where they make the music feel much larger, particularly when the guitars pull back, but they never become the main attraction.
The production helps all of this. It is heavy without being completely suffocated, and there is enough separation between the instruments to pick things apart when you want to. The guitars still have the roughness you expect from Extreme Metal, while the drums have enough punch to stop the slower sections from becoming flat.
If there is a problem, it is that Ordh sometimes have too many ideas competing for attention. There are sections where the guitars, drums, vocals and synths are all doing something at once, and you can spend more time trying to follow the arrangement than actually getting lost in it. Some passages could probably have been tightened, particularly when the band are moving through several ideas before finally returning to something that really grabs you.
The twelve-minute title track is the biggest test of that approach. It is ambitious, but it does not feel like an exercise in making the longest possible song. There is enough variation to keep it moving, and the slower sections give the heavier passages more impact when they come back around. It is the kind of track that makes more sense after a few listens rather than immediately revealing everything.
What I also appreciate is that Ordh are not pretending their progressive side means they have to abandon the uglier parts of Death Metal. There are plenty of old-school touches in the riffs, and you can hear that the musicians have spent time listening to the more obscure and twisted side of the genre. There are hints of that Demilich and Timeghoul sort of weirdness in places, but the band are not simply copying those sounds.
This is a debut with a lot of ambition, and thankfully most of it works. It is not an album I would recommend putting on if you want something immediate and straightforward because it asks you to actually pay attention. At the same time, it never becomes so self-important that the Death Metal gets buried underneath the progressive elements.
‘Blind In Abyssal Realms’ is dense, occasionally overworked and probably a little longer than it needs to be, but there is enough good material here to make the extra effort worthwhile. Pulverised have once again pulled something interesting out of the underground, and if Ordh can keep the ambition while learning when to leave an idea alone, there is plenty of room for them to develop from here. (Deen “Brother Darkness” Gabriel)
