KONKEROR. When I read the name, I didn't have overly high hopes, truth be told. I expected yet another mediocre and rather uninspired Death Metal debut of which there are literally hundreds scattered all over the last decade which, at best, lives through an entire spin before being discarded.

And I was so wrong.

KONKEROR is a Detroit-based Death Metal band founded in 2011 and released their debut, "The Abysmal Horizons", the year after, which was then re-released in 2014 with a new artwork and the addition of a ninth bonus song. Their style is a Blackened form of Death Metal with both Progressive and Middle Eastern elements fused into it, with inspirations from the occult and the mythical, in an almost IMMOLATION meets MELECHESH kind of way that occasionally plays into VADER, NILE and even BEHEMOTH territories. Those are big names to live up to, and that's exactly what this album does.

There's not a single sign that this was a debut album: The sound is near perfection, the skills of the musicians are unquestionable and the songs are titanic in their onslaught. These are high-class musicians who truly know how to make their instruments come alive. The dual guitars, like a two-headed monstrosity of wonder and carnage, lead the songs across a wide spectrum of intelligently constructed dynamic compositions and styles that never cease to amaze and never loses focus on the direction of the song, and is done so to the point where the only comparison I feel is accurate would be the genre-defining compositions of DEATH's very own Chuck Shuldiner. The drums play not only with earth-shattering technicality and brutal precision, but perhaps most importantly with a sense of purpose and belonging that is so rare it becomes mesmerizing to hear - I don't think I've heard their kind since SEPULTURA. In the background the bass tremble on like a typhoon of force, yet with a precise purpose and sound that magically binds the instruments together into a unified assault. And on top of all this, KONKEROR can boast with a Death Metal vocalist capable of delivering an empowering diversity of monstrous vocal roars that even those outside the Extreme Metal sphere can hear and understand.

And you needn't listen long to grasp in full what these guys are made of, as the album opens up with the absolute killer track, "I, Monolithic", which after a powerful minute-long intro gets blasting on every cylinder and displays throughout its course just how grand the scope of KONKEROR's music is with its quasi-Melodic yet brutal duality - and how well they execute it. It's followed by "Towers", a mammoth of crushing riffs and mournful guitar leads which aims to beat all sense and hope out of its listener. "Incantations" takes over with an eerie-sounding fusion of Doom, Black and Death Metal that brings up visions of the summoning of demons. It then flows flawlessly into the fourth track, "Beyond the Abysmal Horizons", whose mighty riffs and superb guitars feels like a march into (or perhaps rather, out of) Hell itself, only to fade into an unholy outro of impending destruction. And impending destruction is exactly what follows as "Creator/Destroyer" enters the stage and absolutely destroys everything in a relentless all-out assault in an almost Grindy way, which is then continued by a more Thrash-inspired assault on "Usurpers of the Primal Womb" that brings the mind both to the glory days of the mighty SLAYER as well as the creations of later-day BEHEMOTH. The band then turns on their Progressive side for the epic "The Pillars of Creation", which stands clearly different from the rest of the album yet equal in its vision and creation. The original album ender, "...and the Cosms Flow Eternal", brings back the relentless fury of "I, Monolithic" and "Creator/Destroyer", as if to crush whatever resistance remained. For the re-released version, the bonus track "Cenotaph" has the joy of ending the album, which is an extremely dynamic and varied song with many Thrash-inspirations.

The simple conclusion: This is a stupendously excellent album that absolutely Konkers(I had to, I really did). It's absolutely flawless, and there's not a Death Metal band in the world which wouldn't be proud to call this their own, but that glory befalls entirely on KONKEROR who by every right should just have bought themselves a one-way ticket to Death Metal stardom with "The Abysmal Horizons", and I tremble to imagine what will come out of these guys with such a monumental start!