Album Review: INFERI – THE PATH OF APOTHOESIS

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Ah, death metal. I can’t get enough of you. My latest love affair with death metal comes in the form of Nashville band Inferi, and their first release in four years, The Path of Apotheosis. According to the press release, the band went through some rough shit, which caused them to press the pause button on making music. But now they’re back and without a doubt, Apotheosis was worth waiting for.

Start to finish, we get treated to the mind-bending technical guitar skills of Malcolm Pugh and Mike Low (who also produced, engineered and mixed Apotheosis), as they deliver soaring classical solos and riffs with ungodly like precision and speed that make Yngwie Malmsteen sound like a slow-jam by D’Angelo.

All 11 tracks on the concept record (based on the emergence of the human race) are jam-packed full of dark orchestral compositions accompanied by the impossibly fast timekeeping of Jack Blackburn (who replaced former drummer Eric Brown) and laser-sharp scream-o of vocalist Josh Harrell. When it comes to vocals, there’s no shortage of them on Apotheosis, like a featured solo by Mark Hawkins (DEVOLVED), Denver death/prog vocalist Stevie Bosier of Dissonence in Design, and the very loud and clear clean vocals of Emily Low who’s featured on two of the record’s ear-annihilating tracks, Destroyer and the record’s title track.

But seriously, can we talk about Josh Harrell vocals for a minute. Harrell is one of those hard vocalists that make it difficult to pay attention to anything else but the speedy words he spits out. And Harrell is one of the death metal masters when it comes to keeping pace with the speedball fretting on Apotheosis. Speaking of speedballs, also appearing on Apotheosis are the shredding skills of Ralph Santolla (Obituary, Decide, Iced Earth).

In a recent interview with guitarist Malcolm Pugh over on Dead Rhetoric, the band gets called out for being seriously underrated. And it’s true. Despite their hiatus, Inferi has been putting out ear-clobbering metal since 2000. And in Pugh’s own words, the second coming of Inferi is starting with a “clean slate”. And I’m here to tell you that “clean slate” is death metal code for “sounds like Cannibal Corpse, only faster”.

So progressive death metal from Nashville gets two devil horns up from yours truly. And if you’re scratching your heavy metal hair over me stringing the words “progressive death metal from Nashville” together, don’t. Ghost recorded Infestissuman in Nashville. And old school metal like Oblivion Myth and the 80’s laced crunch of Intruder was happening over 30 years ago. Fast forward to the present and we’ve got dark doom from bands like Battle Path and Black Tar Prophet, who collectively put out a couple of sick EP’s in 2012, psycho-doom sounds from Seawitch, and bleak funeral marches from Loss and their gloomy 2013 record, Despond (honorable mention shout-out to metal nihilists Hecatomb RIP). So don’t be so quick to dismiss Nashville as a one-note twang-town, the black metal scene is clearly alive and well and can’t wait to bludgeon your eardrums

The Path of Apotheosis is out now Nashville based record label, The Artisan Era.

Inferi’s Bandcamp Page

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