Bandcamp There is a very particular kind of extreme metal that has no interest in sounding clean, and Death Saturnalia (With Temples Below) is a proud example of it. Ensanguinate, four musicians from Ljubljana who came up through the Slovenian thrash scene before forming this band in 2020, make blackened death metal that worships at the altar of the late 1980s: Aura Noir, Nifelheim, Repugnant, early Morbid Angel and Celtic Frost, the filthy end of the tradition where atmosphere comes from grime rather than gloss. Their second album is a monument, in their own words, to the female form in occultism, invoking Kali and Lilith and the Sumerian death-goddess Ereshkigal, and it sounds exactly the way a record with those reference points should: hot, dense, and caked in dirt.
It is worth being clear about that dirt, because it is the point and not a defect. Mixed and mastered by guitarist and vocalist Andrej Čuk himself, the record is deliberately raw: a mid-forward, rehearsal-room wall where the fuzzed guitars fuse with a growling, distorted bass into one saturated mass, the drums organic and untriggered, the vocals buried deep and reverbed into the murk. Judged by a modern death metal yardstick this is all “wrong,” the low mids stacked, the note definition swallowed, the cymbals harsh at the top. Judged by the tradition it is working in, it is correct, and anyone reaching for this kind of record wants precisely this texture. To mark it down for refusing a clinical mix would be to misunderstand what it is for.
What actually determines whether a record like this lives or dies is the riffs, and Ensanguinate have them in quantity. “On Wings of Bone,” the single, rides a repetitive riff focus but uses sharp tempo shifts and sudden rhythmic pauses to keep it from settling into a drone, and it is the clearest statement of what the band do well. “The Whip and the Pendulum,” the nine-minute centrepiece, is the most dynamically ambitious thing here, swinging from an almost clinically dry ambient passage into a deliberately overdriven wall, the frequency balance shoved to the edge of pain in a way that reads as intent rather than accident. “Angel of a Thousand Poisons” opens the album proper with the same trick in miniature, a dense compressed assault broken by a long dry clean section, and “Daughter to Cain” closes it in full lo-fi possession, everything fused into one heaving live-in-the-room mass. The short instrumental “Lámia” that opens the record is the one weak link, a synth-and-brass mood piece that leans on drone without much shape, but at under a minute it is a doorway rather than a song.
The band’s lineage shows in the playing. These are people who spent years in thrash bands, and the riff craft, the sense of when to accelerate and when to drop into a groove, is the work of players who have been doing this a long time. Death Saturnalia is not trying to reinvent anything, and it does not need to. It is a filthy, conviction-heavy, tradition-literate record that knows exactly what it wants to be and hits it squarely, riff after riff, with the ceiling forgiven and the lights off. For the audience it is aimed at, that is close to everything you could ask.
Filthy, 80s-rooted blackened death metal, deliberately raw and self-produced by the guitarist. The rawness is the tradition, not a fault: a mid-forward, rehearsal-room wall where fuzzed guitars fuse with a growling distorted bass, the drums organic and untriggered, the harsh vocals buried deep in reverb. “On Wings of Bone” rides a repetitive riff but uses tempo shifts and rhythmic pauses to keep it moving, and it is the clearest example of the band’s strength. The nine-minute “The Whip and the Pendulum” is the most dynamic piece, swinging from a clinically dry ambient passage into a deliberately overdriven wall, the balance shoved to the edge of pain on purpose. “Angel of a Thousand Poisons” opens with a dense compressed assault broken by a long dry clean section, and “Daughter to Cain” closes in full lo-fi murk. The intro “Lámia” is the one weak spot, a shapeless synth-and-brass drone, but it runs under a minute. Riff-rich, conviction-heavy and exactly as raw as it intends to be.
Standout tracks: The Whip and the Pendulum, On Wings of Bone, Angel of a Thousand Poisons
