Malediction’s “The Soil Throne” is a testament in resilience

As if a wormhole appeared, linking the early 90s to the early 2020s, Malediction’s new EP “The Soil Throne” feels like a bridge that has been long building to distort the fabric of time and provide us with the liberty of walking back to 1990 as we please.

This raw death metal reeks of authenticity throughout the record, and exudes passion, which revived a band that wasn’t sleeping for a couple decades, but rather piling up the rage to write the most face grinning death metal, brutal and straight forward, with just a pinch of melody to bring some subtility into it and hint that it is coming from the nineties.

The 6-track, 25-minutes EP drags you into a perfectly well-balanced mix of death metal elements: chuggy stomping riffs that hammer-smash your face, as well as the unrelenting tremolos lacerating your ears, backed up with the occasional mid-tempo groovy parts and the unmissable machine-gun-like blast beats which are the bread and butter to any self-respecting death metal creation. The apotheosis, “In Maledictus Sol” is a testament of the band’s maturity and a proof that the path to brutality can be through melancholy, and a ballad in a death metal release only contrasts the aggressiveness, and emphasizes it.

This EP is a testament to resilience, passion and persistence. It comes to remind us of the essence of death metal, and metal in general, that of keeping the passion flame ablaze through the test of time. That the fulfillment for a metal band is the self-satisfaction of creating a product that’s genuine and true to one’s self, rather than reaching for compromising summits.