ALBUM REVIEW: Purtenance – Buried Incarnation

Finnish Death Metallers PURTENANCE are back with their fourth album. Out now via Xtreem Music.

Eerie soundscapes draw in before droning, crushing riffs up the doomy vibes of the record. Tight drum work intersperses the haunting guitars, giving us the true melancholic greatness of Finnish Death Metal. Picking up the pace, we see some morbid crawling cymbal work and creepy riffs that delve into a charnel passage of deathly extremity. The vocals growl and snarl with just as much macabre energy as the grave-opening instrumentals, packing an extreme and atmospheric punch that is just as haunting as it is brutal. The raspy crunch of the guitars is vicious enough to drive through the cascading drums alongside meaty vocals, harkening back to the likes of Sentenced and Convulse.

Melodic lead work soaring above devastating rhythms, the sombre vibrancy drawing in a more recent style of Finnish Death-Doom akin to the likes of Hooded Menace and Solothus. This is some gorgeous yet dismally dark and fierce material that shows Purtenance are not a one trick horse. Blending beauty and melody with monolithic heaviness, there is so much texture and emotion to this brooding record. The slower, drawn out parts are haunting and the faster parts are obliterating but we really see the best of both in the mid-tempo, crawling and spectral parts which dominate the album. Flowing and glistening with ethereal and otherworldly darkness.

Shimmering with doomy energies and barraging us with corpse-splitting grooves, Purtenance have the might of Finland’s Death Metal scene very clearly influencing their sound (coming full circle as an influential early band), a scene they contribute a superb record to. Convulsing with morbidity and spewing forth a rancid yet marvellously tasteful style of Death Metal which is memorably catchy and groovy, but more importantly resplendently atmospheric and expansive, with a huge production allowing all nuances to be witnessed. This being said there is a raw charm to the album with nothing being overly polished, keeping the underground and old school Death Metal vibes intact to really give us the best presentation possible for this strangulating opus of death.

Purtenance are one of those bands who may be unknown to many as part of the great Finnish Death Metal movement, but this needs to change. On their fourth album we see a ferocious yet stunning slab of Death Metal excellence unravel before us in a most haunting manner. Tasteful and chilling, many horrors will come to life while this record is playing and it is one that full attention should be devoted to. Magnificent. -8.5/10