ALTAR of PLAGUES
Teethed Injury and Glory
Review

There are very few times when I listen to music and am completely at a loss for how to describe it.  Most metal bands, for all their mixing and experimentation, can still be broken down into the constituent parts they are channeling: this is sludge, this is post-rock, this is black metal, etc.  Even the best, most adventurous records, like Inter Arma’s great Sky Burial, can fit this kind of classification.  That doesn’t mean they are less for it, just that my mind can more easily describe them.

But, with Teethed Injury and Glory, the newest from Ireland’s Altar of Plagues, I’m completely stumped.  On its surface, it contains many of the same elements as previous AoP albums, screeches and blast beats and hazy guitars.  But all of those pieces fit together in new, alien patterns, drawing from an inanely wide range of sources, yet wholly original.  You likely won’t listen to a better, more interesting extreme album this year.

And that extreme tag, rather than metal, perfectly sums up this record.  It contains many of the signifiers of traditional and experimental metal, blast beats, growls and palm-muted guitars.  But what is most striking is how these standard elements somehow make the album sound less like something a metal band would produce, because for every ‘normal’ bit, five other elements undercut or twist it until you don’t know what you’re listening to.  The most human sounds somehow become the most alien.

First single (and yes, this album had a single) “God Alone” lays down the gauntlet: at only four-and-change minutes, it is fully half as long as the shortest song on Mammal, AoP’s previous record, and yet somehow manages to cram in twice as much material, tempo shifts and painful noises.  It is a work of painful, punishing minimalism, driven by a slowly changing guitar riff and double-bass drum, drones and metallic voices overlaying its metamorphosing form.  Every piece, no matter how disjointed, fits together, mutated rather than welded.  It is the sound of bodies crashing, bending together.  One thing is clear: this is not a black metal band anymore.

Other tracks continue this trend.  Centerpiece “A Remedy and a Fever” begins with howls and industrial pulses before tearing itself wide open, droning voices flooding your ears.  AoP embrace electronic elements all over Teethed Glory, but not in the sense of mood-setting synthesizers or thin drum machines; instead, they insert loops and heavily-processed sounds all over their songs, turning instruments into projections of tortured violence.  The guitars that enter “Remedy” half-way through its run sound more like interstellar static than anything earthly.  Where their peers embrace shamanism and ‘mother earth’ mysticism, AoP have entered the void.

But, with an album like this, who could their peers be?  Perhaps most impressive about the album as whole is how it creates the dynamic flow of a single piece of music throughout, never resorting to acoustic or clean guitar tones to signify calm moments.  It is a composition of crushing intensity, of blown-out electronics and shattered percussion.  It achieves beauty with none of the standard markers of melody or harmony.  It is massive, impenetrable, and demands to be heard as a whole.  This is what extreme music can be at its peak: pushing boundaries, and making sounds like no one as ever heard.

Label Profound Lore!