“Collective involuntary self-defecation'”.

I salvaged this phrase from the carnage that was my review notes after listening to this first full-length offering from Aussie death metal ‘supergroup’ Project Ultimate Satan. From memory, it refers to what I imagine will happen when you all hear the riff that comes in around the four and a half minute mark on the opening track Symphony Es Infernus, although it might equally refer to the reaction of all right-thinking people should they stumble across this album at any point in it’s duration.

Luckily, we aren’t ‘right-thinking people’ and so you’ll be swinging from the rafters whooping with glee when that riff swings by your ears for the first time, and after that, well… PUS adhere very much to the ‘more is more’ ethos, so there’s plenty more to enjoy. They throw the absolute kitchen sink at every track, leaving nothing in reserve, and the result is an exhausting but ultimately satisfying process that requires a high level of commitment from the listener just to keep up with what’s going on. Drums clatter, samples fly in and out, female vocals augment the underpinning death metal howl of vocalist Scottanic; and whilst this goes on the guitars churn away like a cement mixer tumbling down several flights of stairs on some Satanic building site…

All this means that, the quite superb Is This How Freedom Dies aside, which is one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time –   picking out individual tracks for praise or otherwise is pointless; the album attacks you as a whole, demanding your participation from go to whoa; Highlight moments do present themselves elsewhere  – usually when enough of the band takes a breather at the same time and something else pokes it’s head above the parapet for long enough to snare the ear – but Project Ultimate Satan clearly aren’t the sort of band to be interested in what battered old ears like mine think of what’s going on. This is, quite clearly, the shape of death metal to come as far as these lunatics are concerned and I have to say, on the evidence of this colossal slab of noise, that the future would appear to be very black indeed. Amazing stuff!

The Opus Satanas releases on November 29th.