The opening track on Aussie extremists Immorium‘s new album, Rose Water Black, is utterly, spinetinglingly awesome in it’s summation of the band’s style.

The opening guitar fanfare on Withering – the track in question – sets the hairs on the back of the neck on notice; Dave Smith‘s paint stripping vocals do the rest, backed by some fabulous work from the rest of the band, the sum of which is just about the most devastating six minute slice of sonic supremacy you’ll hear in quite some while.

It sets the tone for the other four tracks that make up RWB; One minute blast furnace brutality, the next fragile, gentle introspection, then windmilling intensity… as recipes go, it’s pretty much watertight, but though the band largely repeats this pattern on each track there is never one point where the ‘schtick’ gets stale. Smith has a quite formidable set of pipes, but somehow, in all the intensity he possesses an ear for… if not melody then certainly phrasing that makes his contributions just as much an instrument as the guitars of Jared Williams and Dan Norton, the pulsing bass of Nick McAuley or the drumstorm of Chris Vandermark.

Williams and Norton are a formidable six string pairing, right up there with The Eternal‘s Mark Kelson and Richie Poate when it comes to the ability to play off of one another and alternate between gut wrenching heaviness and tear jerking gentility at the flick of a switch. If you love clever guitar interplay then every song on this album is going stright onto all your playlists, let me tell you…

At five songs in length, you might complain that there isn’t enough here to satiate your extreme metal hunger, but the flipside of that is that there are literally no weak points to report. The band doesn’t waste a single note here, with the result being an album you’ll be listening to over and over again over the next few months. Highly recommended!

Rose Water Black releases on July 21st.