A mysterious and intriguing work this “Obliticus” of Umbah, name behind which a single man hides actually, Cal Scott. It’s a violent bloody grind/industrial, that is (to make it simple) a very savage grind/death continuously supported by a hellish drum machine and by some synthetic patterns. Practically the similar idea behind the first album of Meathook Seed and of some (very few) songs of Brutal Truth and Obituary, even if here it characterizes the whole creative speech of the scottish band. Someway they look like the contemporary The Berzerker, but while these latest just limit themselves in exploiting the electronic to produce something paroxystically violent and savage, without overbordering the limits of “analogical” extreme music, Umbah try to mix together the traditional death/grind with the most iconoclast electronic music, in a game of roles where the guitars are obsessive and cold like electronic effects and samples help the guitars to roar even louder. The project, mature and complete, succeeds to be as interesting as much it does recur to synthetic resources, reaching a balanced equilibrium between the two main expressive forms, even if the inability to coagulate this expressive force around superior songwriting intuitions still castrates Umbah from the reaching of those universally disturbing results they aspire to. As usual, clever but he can do some better.

Fulvio Adile