Description
Hailing from the oft-overlooked scene of Argentina, INFERNAL CURSE are a study in patience and defiance. Forming in 2008, early on, the band’s sound was strictly within the blown-out blackthrash characteristic of South America’s most-underground metal, culminating in the clattering ‘n’ chaotic Awakening of the Damned debut LP in 2012. However, it was with the IRON BONEHEAD-released mini-album The End Upon Us in 2014 where INFERNAL CURSE truly found their stride. Reigning in the chaos for a more pulsing form of barbarity, the power-trio were as violent and virulent as ever, but pushed the still-overwhelming physicality into the beyond. Amazingly, they then pushed beyond The Beyond with 2016’s Apocalipsis full-length, again released by IRON BONEHEAD. Bestial metal taken to its psychedelic extremes, Apocalipsis presented a paradox between profundity and crudity, forever elevating INFERNAL CURSE above the mongrel hordes mindlessly battering away to the same well-worn, black/white/red-all-over Blasphemytropes.
That album no doubt proved to be an apex for INFERNAL CURSE, and thereafter did the band stick to EPs and splits – and even then, three years on from Apocalipsis. Now, at long last, INFERNAL CURSE deliver their third album, Revelations Beyond Insanity. Once again, the Argentinians both embody and defy the bestial metal paradigm, and harken back to the earliest expulsions from mid ’80s South America. After its eerie church-organ intro, Revelations Beyond Insanity kicks in with one of the most SAVAGE guitar/bass tones in many years; swirling and deliriously effected, all strings chundering forth from their fingers congeal into a crumbling cathedral of nightmarish enormity. That drummer Bestial Offensor follows suit with a loose & lively tornado of DD Crazy-style controlled chaos should not be surprising: South American touchstones like Bloody Vengeance, Immortal Force, and especially INRI and Sexual Carnage are recast in a manner both world-eating and ceremonial. Yet, for INFERNAL CURSE, even when plumbing the depths of primitivism, a haunting throughline elevates their approach above base barbaric physicality and into the realm of rigorous mind-expansion – that that Beyond explodes into a kaleidoscope of feral atavism at the heart of the psychedelic experience. Or, simply dispense with fancy words altogether and submit to the overwhelming onslaught of Revelations Beyond Insanity: INFERNAL CURSE have returned to the full-length front to reclaim their throne.