Pestilence

Consuming Impuse (1989)

By the late 1980s if things in Metal were not already becoming morbid, they were about to begin to become unarguably so with the explosion of Death Metal. During this period there was a group of European bands, led by those like Pestilence, who started splicing Death Metal and elements of Doom Metal. On Consuming Impulse the music is still very much grounded in elements of Thrash Metal, but as part of the evolution away from this foundation, there are increasingly more unusual chord voicings and tempo changes being introduced, which make the music sound more sinister and chaotic. Whilst there are still plenty of blistering sections like the faster Metal of the 1990s, they do not define the music. Instead there are more abrupt, in-your-face tempo changes, full of violence and terror.

There are many riffs built upon chromatic scale configurations and also lots of droning dissonant chords or intervals that were previously not commonly found in Metal. The arch-typical palm-muted strum is still found, switching being fast up/down strokes or triplets, and is mixed with bending/squealing notes. However the rhythm section is more off-kilter, more jarring and angular, and increasingly unpredictable. It has a heavy pummelling groove at times, that becomes suffocating and incredibly dense due to the heavy down-tuning of the guitars. Some of the older style AB riff patterns of Heavy and Thrash Metal have been inverted. By these I mean an aggressive palm-muted strum followed by power chords for emphasis and momentum. Here the chord voicings mentioned previously often come before the palm-muting,  giving the music a dramatic and often ominous or looming feeling.

It is this ominous and looming feeling, created by the see-sawing and unsettled rhythms, that feels like the music will collapse under it's own weight. And it often does... into slow, crawling Doom Metal sections that often form the centrepiece of the song, ripping apart all of the prior tension, like a giant, flailing monster. Often in these sections dissonant chords are layered on top of chords or notes from the high-end of the guitar neck,  creating an ethereal or haunting layer behind the music, not unlike the way that some bands use keyboards to accentuate the desolate or tortured feeling.

On top of the monster guitar section are the vocals. Built around a throaty growl (or maybe a throaty shriek at times) they are agonised, tortured, spewing forth bile or whatever other demonic presence he is trying to exorcise from his body. The suffering so adequately voiced is very fitting in an album full of death, disease, insect swarms, trauma, dehydration etc. The drumming has that thick, deep cavernous snare sound that would become an important component of the Death Metal music to come and mixed with tasteful use of double-kick rhythms gives the already monstrous sound of the guitars an extra layer of depth. There is not really any blasting as such,  but the skins are pounded pretty heavily to add intensity when the tempo picks up.

All in all,  Consuming Impulse is a fairly good way point along the road from Metal's evolution from Thrash Metal to full-blown Death Metal.