NITHING — Agonal Hymns (review)

NITHING — Agonal Hymns album cover Album · 2023 · Brutal Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
siLLy puPPy
NITHING is the one-man disso-brutal death metal project of Matt Kilner who has spent the last decade as drummer of the disco-brutal death metal band Iniquitous Deeds of Walnut Creek, CA due east of San Francisco. This NITHING not to be confused with the blackened death metal band from Ohio has been around since 2014 and then released an EPs worth of material the following year and then one split in 2020 with Syphilic. The year 2023 finds NITHING’s debut AGONAL HYMNS haunting the world with some of the most frenzied brutal death metal there is to be found.

This short but eternal burst of explosive musical dynamite may only be 23 1/2 minutes long but pretty much blows away bands like Suffocation or even Kilner’s own Iniquitous Deeds band in that it is absolutely relentless in its pummeling bombast. This release pretty much tackles all the extreme limits of death metal and then turns it up a few notches even further. True that brutal death metal can be a fairly one-dimensional affair with a never-ending churning out of blitzkrieg riffing and blastbeats that blur into one big haze of noisy backdrop and that’s not to say that AGONAL HYMNS doesn’t deliver that in abundance at all.

What makes this album stand out a bit is that the production is crystal clear and allows the various guitar angst to find its own parts whether it’s the chugging riff-a-thon or the Morbid Angel inspired guitar squeals but like any excellent disso-death artist NITHING knows when to offer a bit of relief and offer a brief melodic solo or some crucial moments of atmospheric embellishments. Another feature is the excellent drumming craziness which is obviously Kilner’s specialty. Instead of a monotonic blastbeat approach, the timbres are fortified with a plethora of metal drums and varying nuances. Of course it all whizzes by at a million kilos per second but this is brutal death metal after all.

The first three tracks are brutal for brutality’s sake but with “Lustral Cognitive Erosion” the underpinnings begin to reveal themselves more with micro-moments of silence and pauses that reveal a structure beneath the incessant chugging. Despite being a drummer Kilner handles all instruments quite well with excellent guitar workouts as well as a stellar production job that suits this style of noisy metal quite well. The album is mercifully brief but absolutely crushes your soul with an agonizing torturous procession of incessant stabs of sound. The 3-minute “Wreathed In Sores” deviates a bit with a repetitive backdrop before unleashing the speed of lightning brutality. I love it when a brutal death metal act can escaped the confines of the generic nature of the genre. Chaos rules!
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