ULCERATE — Cutting the Throat of God (review)

ULCERATE — Cutting the Throat of God album cover

Album · 2024 · Technical Death Metal

4/5 · 2024-12-25
UMUR

"Cutting the Throat of God" is the seventh full-length studio album by New Zealand, Auckland based death metal act Ulcerate. The album was released through Debemur Morti Productions in June 2024. It´s the successor to "Stare into Death and Be Still" from April 2020. No lineup changes have happened and in fact the trio lineup of Jamie Saint Merat (drums, percussion), Michael Hoggard (guitars), and Paul Kelland (bass, vocals) have performed together in this incarnation since Ulcerate´s sophomore studio album "Everything Is Fire" from 2009. A few guitarists have performed with them live, but none have appeared on the band´s albums since 2009.

Already a few albums back, Ulcerate crawled out from under the shadow of dissonant oriented Gorguts influenced death metal, which was a style gracing a lot of their previous releases. While the dissonant and heavy death metal riffs are still a part of Ulcerate´s sound on "Cutting the Throat of God" (as it was on the last couple of albums too), they´ve slowly developed into something else...almost transcending genre definitions and boundaries, incorporating elements of technical death metal, dissonant death metal, progresive extreme metal, avant-garde metal moments, and post-metal build-ups and atmospheres. Very much their own at this point, and now a leader of the pack instead of being one of the followers (of the Gorguts school of dissonant death metal), Ulcerate have reached the thing that almost every artist strives for, which is having a unique sound and the respect which follows.

Stylistically this is dark, oppressive, and bleak music. It´s like watching the world crumple in front of your eyes while waiting for an inevitable apocalypse. The combination of ultra heavy riffs and rhythms, and the deeply melancholic and bleak dissonant riffs and sad slighly mellower post-metal parts is an effective one. The growling death metal vocals are relatively one-dimensional but the lack of too much aggressive emotion is probably a conscious decision, as the more emotionless growling fits well with the bleak concept of the instrumental part of the music.

"Cutting the Throat of God" features 7 tracks, and a total playing time of 57:46. All track are between 7 and 9 minutes long and this is by no means easy listening material. Not just because of the song lengths, but the tracks themselves are also quite complex in structure and goes through many different sections and dynamics. So brace yourself for a relatively long, challenging, and emotionally draining listening experience. Not draining in the sense that this is an awful release to sit through, but in the sense that it requires your full attention, and listening to almost an hour of music this oppressive and bleak is almost always a challenge.

The album is packed in a well sounding production job, and you can hear all details in the soundscape. It´s not too polished though and "Cutting the Throat of God" is still a very heavy, raw, and brutal sounding release. Upon conclusion "Cutting the Throat of God" is another impressive high quality release from Ulcerate. It´s not often an artist gets better and better with each release but Ulcerate is one such act. It´s almost impossible to understand that this is album number seven and they still sound as hungry, experimental, and brutal as they did when starting out, and to my ears have actually become much more interesting over the years. A 4 - 4.5 star (85%) rating is deserved.