Grave Upheaval

Grave Upheaval

Untitled (2013)

Nuclear War Now

***GRAVE UPHEAVAL's debut LP is far more than a mere extrapolation of the work featured on the band’s exceptional 2010 demo and its two subsequent split EPs. Listening to this LP cannot be a passive experience; Grave Upheaval constructs an environment within which the listener is subsumed. The tracks on this album are ominous and oppressive. Inverted tempos and deliberately washed out production contribute to the creation of what may arguably be the most atmospheric Death Metal album to date. Stylistically, Grave Upheaval belongs to the camp of Australian bands that includes Portal, Impetuous Ritual, and their progeny. While those bands tend to exhibit a certain technical virtuosity that occasionally renders the music uncomfortably abstruse to more orthodox listeners, Grave Upheaval revel less in technicality and more in the cavernous darkness of impenetrable walls of repetitious and discordant guitars. The accentuation of ambience rather than technique is Grave Upheaval’s greatest strength and makes the music immediately arresting to the listener without the need to engage in repeat listens before it even begins to set in. The songwriting and performance on the album is primal and severe, while the exquisitely disorienting haze in which the songs are drenched produces a hallucinatory effect. Forms emerge and retreat into the sonic miasma producing a textural richness rarely achieved in Death Metal. As with the band’s prior releases, the presentation and conceptual underpinnings of the band’s work are obscure—alluring, but always remaining just out of the reach of cognition. The album and the tracks...

Grave Upheaval

Demo

Nuclear War Now

***Prior to the release of GRAVE UPHEAVAL's first two albums in 2013 and 2018, respectively, the band had already firmly established its uniquely-recognizable brand of leaden death metal with its self-titled demo from 2010 and two split recordings with Encoffination and Manticore from the subsequent two years. These three recordings are now combined and reissued on a single LP by Nuclear War Now! Productions with the goal of recalling attention to the incarnation of one of the most primitively effectual bands of its ilk in recent memory. As a bonus, this LP reissue includes an additional unreleased track from the 2010 demo as well as an otherwise unreleased demo version of “Necrose Evangelicum,” a cover track from the notorious Brighter Death Now death industrial project.

Grave Upheaval

Untitled

Nuclear War Now

***Grave Upheaval’s second album of deathly anonymity and the band’s first release in five years, which once again opens the black womb. One of the most impressive Death Doom albums since diSEMBOWELMENT’s “Transcendence into the Peripheral” Black vinyl double LP in gatefold jacket with booklet and featuring a vinyl-only bonus track.