AZARATH hail from Poland (land of several metal greats) and boast an impressive lineup of releases. I had heard the name but hadn't yet checked them out. For a Death Metal legionnaire (fanboy) like me the prospect was exciting. "In Extremis" greets the viewer with a cryptic and ominous album cover. Are those pillars decaying people? Is that blood? Smoke? It's all a great lead in to the oncoming storm.

"In Extremis" is an intense release. From the first millisecond into this album it comes at you full charge. I reset the first song just to make sure I didn't start it mid-way through. In what's become a trend, so many releases nowadays have a frivolous intro of keyboard/synthesizer/choir/acoustic/mandolin/pan flute/monkey noises. It was refreshing to see a band not screw around and dive right in. This is a ride you get taken for and it doesn't let up until it's over. The guitars shred, the bass is blasting, the vocals are monstrous (a dual assault from guttural growls and throat-peeling screams), and what I felt was a real highlight, the drumming. Unholy cow! (A regular cow?) The drums on this are amazing. At times it sounds like a continuous crack of thunder ripping the sky apart. The layers here form an incredible wall of sound. It's Blackened Death Metal that wages a war on its listener's ears. Only the mightiest and hardiest fans of Death Metal will make it.

This is for the lovers of speed and heaviness. Everything is a straight forward berserker charge, there are some solid leads in songs like "Annihilation (Smite the Illusions)" and "Sign of Apophis" but honestly the songs come at you so quick you may need to listen a few times to really catch them. The same with the riffs, they sneak in between bouts of the frenetic pace every song is played at. I found with this release that the more I played it, and the more intricate I realized it was. There's changes and subtle elements thrown in that help diversify the album. For example, the song "The Slain God" has some cleaner vocals chanting in it, but it's a minor touch so it doesn't really take away anything from the momentum while still providing some variety to the sound. I appreciated this more after several listens.

There's not much else to say about this release because as with all art, it's best to be experienced firsthand. This is incredibly well put together Death Metal. It's a pure dose of chaos-fueled brutality. It's intricate, it's fast, it's a roaring gale of untamed primality delivered via precision kill-shot. As carnage filled as this type of music can sound, there is an order and a composition to it all that highlights the skill of the musicians. For veterans of the ol' spooky devil tunes this one should be a no-brainer. For those of you that are new to the genre or metal in general, buckle up because this is a harsh journey through the blasphemous cacophony. I would highly recommend this to fans of BEHEMOTH (It's their drummer on this one), HATE ETERNAL, INCANTATION, IMMOLATION or any of those other great classic Death Metal bands that define extreme music.