***Mysterious Norwegian death metal cult Impugner reissue their debut mini-album Advent of the Wretched worldwide (with new art and master) on CD via Sentient Ruin and on cassette tape via Caligari Records, after a limited self release tape had surfaced in Norway via the band back in 2021. "Advent of the Wretched" brings us back to the early and formative years of death metal when bands like Autopsy, Death, Pungent Stench, Nihilist, and Darkthrone in their Soulside Journey era were issuing their first works and laying the groundwork for what would become the perfect symbiosis between the gruesome morbidity and the executional excellence which has made death metal so loved and revered thereafter throughout the decades. In the same manner, and with a strong emphasis on traditionalism and timelessness, on this already iconic debut offering Impugner unfold a masterful slab of arcane-sounding death metal oozing with schizoid atmospheres, a putrid production quality and a demented prog-derived songwriting highly reminiscent of Morbus Chron, Obliteration, or of the founding masters mentioned above. The choice of using art for the work licensed from the Edvard Munch estate in Norway is just another sign of this band's insanely tasteful vision and of its deliberate approach in crafting the death metal art which favors a sense of timelessness, unpredictability and a strict adherence to its primordial strengths and vision of it being, and remaining, a timeless art of the absurd.
CD $14.00
11/04/2022