The background: The Ugly was formed in late 2004 in Stockholm, Sweden by Ingemar Gustafson (vocals) and Johan Eriksson (guitars), for the purpose of creating furious and relentless black metal with roots in the bands that put Sweden on the world map in the 1990s.
The album: ‘Decreation’, housed in a sleeve that evokes Bathory’s groundbreaking debut, demonstrates that these goat and necrology-obsessed, corpse-painted guys with crazed eyes are appropriately named.
‘I Am Death’ hammers from the speakers in the kind of guitar frenzy typical of the genre. Everything’s played at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, all the amps are up to eleven and the vocals, gnarly, guttural, strangulated, are way, way down in the mix so you can’t make out a single fucking word. Not that you really need to to catch the sentiment, and the lyrics are probably a huge let-down any way. Better to just ride the blastbeats and the tsunami of churning treble-grinding guitar.
By three tracks in, things have stepped up to a punishing level, an all-put assault of relentless brutality. ‘Crawl’ isn’t a descriptor, it’s a command; the pulverizing attack is sadistic and savage, and the scorched brutality only escalates as the album progresses.
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With the exception of the title track, which has the vaguest hint of melody in places, if you can filter through the blistering squall, there’s nothing to distinguish any of the individual tracks here, no hooks, no defining sense of structure, and no let up.
The six-and-a-half-minute closer, ‘Lögnerna till Aska’ finally slows the pace, but increases the weight proportionally, a thunderous slab of doom-laden metal that drags everything hat preceded it through a swirling vortex into the bowels of hell.
You’ve been warned.
The Ugly – Decreation Online
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