Ehnahre

Ehnahre

Old Earth

Crucial Blast

The third album from Boston ensemble Ehnahre, Old Earth again finds the trio of Ricardo Donoso, John Carchia and Ryan McGuire (the latter two former members of avant-prog rockers Kayo Dot) exploring their unique fusion of hellish death-doom, blackened prog, avant-jazz and experimental composition with earth-scorching results.  Old Earth opens with a distant rustling creeping out of a dank underground space, as the dusty, warbling strains of a 78 RPM record drift past, introducing the first track with an eerie haze of corroded, hallucinatory sound. As a terrifying chorus of operatic female howls suddenly waft out of cracks in the floor, the guitars appear, all alone and slowly weaving an ominous, dissonant melody as the listener is propelled further into Ehnahre’s twisted soundscape. It’s not long before the band tumbles into their trademark atonal death-doom—if anything, even more abstract here than previous releases. Resembling a cross between Disembowelment and Obscura-era Gorguts, the warped, noisy death metal folds in on itself, mutating into crushing, droning riffage. On the intensely creepy second track, double-bass, keyboards and delicate percussion take over, joined by the gorgeous and ghostly trumpets of guest musicians Greg Kelley (Heathen Shame) and Forbes Graham (Kayo Dot). It’s one of Ehnahre’s most spellbinding moments as the band ventures into an twilight world of avant-jazz fusion and shadowy atmospherics. The third movement winds back into bone-crushing death-doom, another monstrous wave of lurching heaviness and dissonant skronk spilling over into the final passage while bludgeoning, jagged death metal riffs underpin a...

Ehnahre

Taming The Cannibals

Crucial Blast

Taming the Cannibals, the sophomore full-length from avant-black / death / doom band Ehnahre, is one of the more cerebral and challenging death metal albums to come through the Crucial Blast headquarters this year. Featuring former members of prog / gothic art-rockers Kayo Dot and avant-death metalists Biolich, the Boston-based group unleashes extreme chaotic dissonance and pitch-black chthonic textures--a combination of atonal 20th-century classical music and vicious blackened death laced with stretches of intense choral ambience and blasts of calcifying, glacial doom. Ehnahre creates some of the most difficult death metal out there, but balances the relentlessly unpredictable arrangements with seething aggression and crushing riffage. Taming the Cannibals continues the discordant black art first witnessed on their 2008 debut album The Man Closing Up. Once again, Ehnahre employs horns and strings, this time performed by guest musicians Greg Kelly (Heathen Shame) on trumpet and C Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) on violin, draping sheets of high-end violin skree and free jazz across ethereal blastscapes and apocalyptic feedback. Six lengthy tracks of demented and distended death metal and harrowing atonality pull the listener ever deeper into claustrophobic depths, crafting a terrifying, hellish vision that makes the skin crawl and sets nerves on edge.