Another one from the slush pile that caught my ear on the flight out to Tunisia was Helmsplitter’s Enraptured by Suffering. Mixing several styles, but without delving so much into a single one as to exclude too many listeners, this album is heavy as fuck and well worth checking out.
This is extreme metal that takes you on a musical roller coaster through a world of misanthropy, pain, frustration and despair. Unpredictable, relentless and absurdly heavy, Helmsplitter manage to blend various styles together in a seamless, naturally flowing and unforced manner that is uncanny. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Scott Creekmore (Broken Hope, Num, SKull, Lupara) and features Blakk (Angelkill, Mortuary Oath, Maskim) on vocals.
Enraptured by Suffering is a heavy album. Really damn heavy. Yet it’s also fast. The guitars are downtuned sludge-style so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if the strings were dragging on the recording studio floor.
Helmsplitter have managed to make one of the heaviest genres of metal and make it accessible to more “mainstream” fans. Moreso, they’ve repeated this trick over all eleven tracks on this album without fucking it up once.
This is one album I went back and re-listened to despite trying to plough through a huge backlog. And I’ll go back to it again. Great stuff.
You can order the album via Horror Pain Gore Death Productions or download it for $6.66 from the label’s bandcamp page.
