Profound Grave/Occult Pantheon - "Immortal Chaos Ascends" (Ex Nihilo Music, 2017)

Bands: Profound Grave/Occult Pantheon
Title: Immortal Chaos Ascends
Genre: Black Metal/Occult Death Metal
Year: 24th March 2017
Time: 33 min
Rating: 61













After a looooong time, the Chilean extreme metal, adored by me, is back on these pages! All the credit of this goes to Ex Nihilo Music, a very young label proudly Chilean but located in Toronto, Canada that contacted me 3 months ago to review it first production, released, curiously, in the same birthday of mine! This first production is titled “Immortal Chaos Ascends” and is a split between two Chilean (obviously!) bands very different called Profound Grave and Occult Pantheon, and each of them run wild with 5 songs.

The first side of the split is up to Profound Grave, a band that has released nothing before “Immortal Chaos Ascend” despite the fact that they were born even in 2013 as Forgotten Graves. Anyway, after an “Intro” curiously orchestral in spite of a beginning made of air siren raids, Profound Grave starts to annihilate some ass with “Black Bread for a Black Season”, a massacre of just under 2 minutes that show everything about Profound Grave: a very raw South-American black metal contaminated a bit by death metal where the guitar solos are completely banned, the drummer beat with non-stop violence through a riot of blast-beats and more thrashy tempos while the singer vomit with ferocious bestiality the whole way. In brief, the style of Profound Grave, made of merciless songs of 3 minutes at most where the demented speed reigns supreme (you think that you'll find the only mid-tempo in "Derange Temple Manifestation"!), remind a lot to me Perversor, another Chilean band known for the ultra-underground maniacs for their masterpiece of endless brutality named "Anticosmocrator", released in 2015 by Hells Headbangers. Squaring the circle, the side of Profound Grave ends with a very short "Outro" that has the same tones of the "Intro" with the addition of the macabre vocals of the singer.

After all this, it's the turn of Occult Pantheon, 3 demons in which there is  the same drummer of Profound Grave, Emperor Orravan Frostreus, that this time sing as well as to play the drums. It is important to underline that the side of Occult Pantheon, another band born in 2013, isn't unreleased because it composed of their entire 2015 demo called "The Omega of the Alpha". And, unfortunately, I have to note that, of their 5 songs, only 2 of them are real songs since the rest consists of mostly orchestral episodes that I skip in a heartbeat because they are too and also too long. But fortunately, the two aforementioned songs, "I've Arrived at Charon Port (Omega)" and (Alpha) To the End of Beginning" (both lasts 6 minutes), shows a good band.

In fact, Occult Pantheon plays an occult death metal able to range from unspeakable doom tempos to (ultra)-fast violent explosions where the very dark but groovy riffing is often close to the bestial black/death metal of bands like Black Witchery and the likes, and you can hear all this especially in "(Alpha) To the End of Beginning" also because it has a truly fantastic opening riff. Then, I also applaud the same Emperor Orravan Frostreus for his excellent and imaginative vocal performance also because he give to the entire music a good ritualistic aura, especially in the last aforementioned number, where there are clear black metal influences during its last two minutes.

It's been such a long wait for this review but it was useful to know two young bands that, also if they offer nothing so exciting or unpredictable (but it's difficult to understand the real value of an young band through only 2-3 songs), do very well their duty. Of them, I prefer Occult Pantheon (rating: 62 while Profound Grave has a good 60) because, despite the fact that they unnecessarily filled their tracklist with a bunch of instrumental orchestral numbers, their music is embraced by a very sulphurous atmosphere also through the excellent vocal style of the singer and some fantastic bestial black/death metal riffs but, said this, I hope they will release some new songs very soon. In other words, the first production of Ex Nihilo Music is surely not bad, and now it is releasing another one, that is the 2016 EP titled "Across the Abyss" of a blackened death metal band known as Samot. Small labels are growing up...

Tracklist:

Profound Grave's side:

1 - Intro
2 - Black Bread for a Black Season
3 - Temple Derange Manifestation
4 - Universal Cadaver of Yahweh
5 - Outro

Occult Pantheon's side:

6 - Travelling Through the Arcane XIII
7 - I've Arrived at Charon Port (Omega)
8 - Sailing Through the Sea of Realities
9 - (Alpha) To the End of Beginning
10 - Across the Portal

Profound Grave's line-up:

Satran - vocals
Grave - guitars
Emperor Orravan Frostreus - drums

Occult Pantheon's side:

Emperor Orravan Frostreus - vocals/drums
Conqueror - guitars
Owlhell - bass

Occult Pantheon: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY437_zXNoycHLSjmTYLczw
Ex Nihilo Music: https://exnihilomusic.blog/