Premiere: Humator – “Curse Of The Pharaoh”
Glad to see that Ancient Egyptian death metal is coming back at the same time as Brendan Fraser. I choose to read this as a good omen for both.
Gonna just admit it early on, I thought I was in for a Mercyful Fate cover. But no, we’re hauling some back-breaking Euro-death metal across the sands to your royal court. Humator‘s approach is definitely not “caveman”, having developed at least a few Bronze Age technologies (like irrigation, or Suicmez-flavored sweep picking), but the mindset on display lends itself to a more wicked sort of primitive struggle. My initial excavations indicate that they stay within modestly brutal territory with periodic stabs of technical legerdemain. The drums are hammer locked, be they swift as a sandstorm or steady as a slave ship, and the guitars hook into them for prolonged beatings, intermittently broken with hissing tremolo and jutting, concussive breakdowns.
Curse Of The Pharoah‘s title track is among the more austere arrangements, mining forward in heavy 8th note drives, but still throws out a head-swirling, dust-devil refrain and a rare slow march. The breakdown recalls the blaring horns announcing the entrance of a royal tyrant, and we might say these decrepit slamming riffs are not unlike the Great Pyramids themselves: Simple to envision, no less majestic to behold. At the end of the day, a pyramid is just a triangle, but it’s very big and made out of stones heavy enough to instantly turn a human into an unnamed smear, should they buckle the wrong way while quarrying. A gigantic, stone-cold monument to terrestrial might, ponderous enough for even the faraway gods to take notice.
