KHNVM - Portals to Oblivion Review

Extreme Metal is always pushing its own musical boundaries. It seems that bands are always trying new, and creative, ways to stand ou from the crowd. It means that sometimes other worldy sonancies will be tested anyway. This other wordly means sonancies that are not common or even weird using dissonancies or other things. Intros, as I told many times before, are the choosen ones for this test. Most of times they are completely away from the music the band wants to deliver, other times they are complementary or auxiliary to what the band desire to pass. In this very especific case the intro works as a real intro to the music KHNVM want to combine with their music.

We had the pleasure of review 2019’s “Foretold Monuments of Flesh” and the two albums are in different pages it seems. “Portals to Oblivion” is slower cadenced with much more emotional passages and the other worldy moments I told before. The guitars now have a more distorted and low toning what make them much heavier. A thing that remains the same is the band’s ability to change in a blink of eye cadence and tempo. That remains intacted. But the general mood of the album is given by “Drink from the Chalice of Suffering” with its cadenced and slow tempo with the guitars played with lots of anger. It sounds like the guitarists are spanking their guitar due the ferocious sound that they take from them. The evil and sick rhythm of the song give the fan goosebumps. Following track “Baptized by the Father Befouled” follows the same path being even slower. The kind of track that the fan feels all the malevolence that it spills. KHNVM are here to prove that speed means nothing when the intent is true – or bad – to the bone.

“Portals to Oblivion” gives a 360º turn in the band’s way of making music. Now they are much more near the Funeral Doom Metal than ever. That combination is spiced by the band’s roots on Death Metal which makes the album much more interesting. It’s the mix of a slow death killing machine with a machine gun that spits fire everywhere.

KHNVM “Portals to Oblivion” was released on December 17th via Neckbreaker Records.

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