Exclusive Album Premiere: Baron‘s Beneath the Blazing Abyss
Finnish flamethrowers.
After months of previews and track premieres, we couldn’t be more stoked to bring you the exclusive premiere of Baron‘s Beneath the Blazing Abyss, officially releasing this Friday, April 26, on Transcending Obscurity Records. In January, I told you about how little regard these Finns have for you, your family, your previous way of life, or anything you hold dear when “Primordial Possession” took hold of me. A month later, it was “Hands of Sin…” that had me firmly in its grasp, shaking me vociferously until my neck snapped, my grey matter leaked out of my ears and nose, and then simply tossed my limp, rag-doll corpse onto the ever-climbing pyre. Roldy even got in on the act just this week, describing the Dantean levels of hell encircling and ensnaring the Slammers, Pitters, and Doomers alike. There’s simply no escaping Beneath the Blazing Abyss.
As I’ve been caught up in the noxious fumes rising up from the flame-licked void, I’m still as besotted by tracks like “Primordial Possession” and “Hands of Sin…” as before. Now, though, I’ve been charred to a crispy stick of human charcoal by “Incinerated Evil,” one of the earlier singles but a track whose unhinged ferocity and malevolence glowers in the pitch-black night. Situated between the album’s two doomiest excursions “At the Dawn of Damnation” and “Bound to the Funeral Pyres,” “Incinerated Evil” feels all the more fiendish. These other tracks, the previously released “Bound to the Funeral Pyres” and the newly unleashed “At the Dawn of Damnation” let the band flex their songwriting chops in a more sombre, bedraggled, and mournful direction. To be sure, “At the Dawn of Damnation” is, for much of its runtime, a constant barrage of double-bass Rottrevore-soaked Finnish death metal, but it takes the time and makes space for early Amorphis death/doom that our more sensitive hellions will appreciate. The track even ends with an acoustic passage courtesy of vocalist Tommi Astala. Guitarist and backup vocalist Jerry Tamminen also imbues both tracks with the slightest hint of choked, poisonous atmosphere, programming in some barely-there-but-very-cursed synths.
Even with those two longer tracks that both crack 9 minutes, Beneath the Blazing Abyss is relentless, barreling forth with the madcap frenzy of Abhorrence‘s Completely Vulgar or Convulse‘s World Without God. Baron make no broken bones about their affinity for death metal from their home country, but they’ve taken that early ’90s blueprint, injected it with a hefty modern production, and sent it out, unfettered and ravenous, into the unsuspecting world. Perhaps I’ve already said too much. Perhaps all this verbosity is beside the point. Just let the band tell you everything you need to know:
“From the bowels of the underworld, “Beneath the Blazing Abyss” ascends with seven spells and 44 minutes of infernal sorcery, ritual, and bloodlust. Pure Finnish death metal brutality with lots of melodies combined with tasteful doom parts and ritualistic synths. Bow down to the mighty BARON!”
By the time you’ve been flensed of every inch of flame-scoured flesh and pounded your fists into broken mush on the dancefloor with the echoes of “Hands of Sin…” ringing in your cerebellum-gushing ears, you’re left to writher and wither in the mortifying gloom of album closer “…Swallowed by Fires Beneath,” a dark-as-darkest-night ambient track that swirls, crawls, inches, and haunts with the itchy fears that would be home on Cryo Chamber Records.
So here it is, after all these months and yet a few days early. Enjoy below our exclusive YouTube stream of Beneath the Blazing Abyss and go order the album, the vinyl, the tank tops, the totes, the sweats from bandcamp.
Beneath the Blazing Abyss is out April 26
on Transcending Obscurity Records.
At this point, you very much know what to do.
Mosh and get moshed.
