The death-metal trio is at its most complex on this pair of companion albums. Beneath the labyrinthine riffs lies some of the group’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet.
There’s a riff that resurfaces throughout Ulthar’s two new companion albums, mutating into different shapes over the course of the combined records’ 80 minutes. It’s a descending, rapid-picked four-note motif that crashes down with all the devastating fury of cosmic debris raining from the sky. Throughout Anthronomicon and Helionomicon, the death-metal stalwarts wind the riff up and release it again in new forms—compressing it, stretching it out, raising it up and down octaves, always retaining its harrowing power. Each time it returns, it’s like sinking back into the same ceaseless nightmare, the kind you can’t wake up from.
Anthronomicon and Helionomicon constitute Ulthar’s most ambitious statements. Until now, the band’s output has largely resembled an exercise in ugliness. The trio—which includes members from Mastery, Tombs, and Vastum—practices a style of pummeling, blackened death metal, alternating between throat-tearing shrieks and gurgling roars over a stampede of riffs. But on this pair of albums, Ulthar take the form of planetary journeymen: Their guitar melodies are more melodic than ever, and they fire off in all directions at once, as if leading the listener down a reality-distorting wormhole. The band has never sounded so technically dense, its constantly morphing time signatures calling to mind Chthe‘ilist’s noxious odysseys, or Gorguts’ swirling fret workouts. Beneath the twisted complexity lies some of the band’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet.
Across both albums, Ulthar largely pick one approach—churning, never-ending death-metal riffage—and stick to it. If 80 minutes of this sounds like a lot, it is. Dividing these records into two separate albums, as opposed to billing them as one double LP, feels purposeful, as though acknowledging that spending more than 40 minutes in this world is a daunting task. But in halved doses, Ulthar’s gnarled, writhing sound proves deadly.
Running through eight tracks in 40 minutes, Anthronomicon is the more potent of the two; shorter song lengths offer concentrated opportunities for Ulthar to demonstrate their melodic capabilities. “Cephalophore” announces the band’s arrival with a triumphant opening riff, stomping into a chugging midsection that alternates between galloping chords and atonal plunges into the lower end of the fretboard. Shelby Lermo’s guitar tone has a staticky crunch to it—a cross between Entombed’s trademark buzzsaw timbre and the hiss of old Darkthrone—and “Fractional Fortresses” funnels this crackling distortion into a sickly opening riff whose feedback hangs in the air over the song’s first 15 seconds. After a minute spent plowing ahead atop a classic black-metal charge, the first instance of that recurring thematic riff appears, acting like a searing chorus for the song between dives back into the muck.
Death-metal albums often live or die according to how successfully they can avoid sheer repetitiveness, and for the most part, Anthronomicon keeps the ideas coming. Halfway through “Flesh Propulsion,” just when it begins to feel like the album may be rehashing itself, Ulthar drop the floor out from underneath with a delirious thrash-metal breakdown. When that starts getting too comfortable, the trio begins deploying one coiled pitch-bend after another, bringing the song to a wickedly dissonant conclusion. “Saccades,” a highlight of the entire two-album project, voyages between unholy tech-death onslaughts and moments of pure ghoulish bliss; Steve Peacock’s croaking howl could keep Gollum up at night. The band soon follows it with a droning passage of alien ambience, hinting at the interstellar abyss to come on LP number two.
Where Anthonomicon focuses Ulthar’s ambitions, Helionomicron unravels them into a sprawling universe of ideas. Like Blood Incantation’s psychedelic sagas, the two tracks on Helionomicron operate on a gradual build, laying the groundwork over cresting 10-minute stretches before finally exploding into frenzied peaks. Wading through those extended arcs can get tiresome, but when it works, the payoff is remarkable. On “Helionomicron,” Lermo and Peacock really dig into the recurring four-note melody, adding garish flourishes and ritualistically pulling it apart over the track’s first seven minutes. After a drifting synth interlude, the track roars back to life in its thrashing second half, bringing its many puzzle pieces together for one thrilling final blitz.
Comparatively, “Anthronomicron” never quite achieves the same layered sense of cohesion. Over the course of its 20 minutes, Ulthar continue to dip back into their cauldron, pulling forth craven black-metal riffs, grinding blast beats, and yet another extended iteration of that recurring guitar melody—but no matter what they try, it can’t help but feel exhausting. As hypnotizing as being trapped in an endless void of demonic licks can be, the majority of the riffs on the second half of Helionomicron sound like restatements of what the band has played already, albeit with less energy than before. When the album finally reaches its conclusion with a four-minute drone of eerie extraterrestrial noise, it’s a relief.
Taken together, these two LPs demand a serious investment—one that may not always completely justify itself. Even so, Anthronomicon and Helionomicon represent a great leap forward for Ulthar. More than ever before, the trio has located a sweet spot between the soaring melodies of black metal and the skull-crushing beatdown of death metal, locking into an airtight group dynamic and crafting some of the band’s most peculiar, abstract riffs yet. Ulthar’s operative mode may be one relentless, full-scale assault, with little in the way of reprieve. But what an assault it is.