A record that, unwillingly of course, takes me back to my days as a young student – 25 years ago. Taking university classes in English Lit and discovering the works of Samuel Beckett – what a thrill it was to read something that was outright undeniable and utterly denying. The absurdity of life put into a nutshell. Who would know that a quarter-century later I would be reviewing a record indirectly connected to one of his plays? Nobody would have. Not even the guys in Malthusian.
First of all, for those unacquainted with Malthusian – let’s quickly explain the band’s name: Back in 1798 Reverend T.R. Malthus published a theory that would lead to the Malthusian Catastrophe: While the growth of mankind is exponential, the growth of food is linear, leading to an ever-widening gap between demand and accessibility. Does that ring a bell – that’s basically our reality in 2025, right?
Speaking of bells - I still have to clue up the connection between the Irish Death Metallers and Beckett. During his middle period, Beckett wrote four stage-plays, among them the famous En attendant Godot and the final was Happy Days: During this play, we witness a couple, Winnie and Willie go about their everyday life, and witness the huge lack of true, deep, meaningful, intentional conversation between them. Oh, I might add, that she is basically stuck waist-deep in a huge mount of earth which at the same time is hindering our sight of Willie. So, their conversation is an absurd one, also because he seems to have to hearing deficiencies. But they are living their happy days and continue doing so. And the first thing we hear in that play is a bell, one that summons Winnie to start her daily errands while her husband is starting to quote from a newspaper. Absurd right? But isn’t that what our life in general is? Isn’t it a quite laughable and absurd idea that you are reading this unimportant babble of mine and putting an effort in getting “you tell to trying am I what of gist the” * while at the same time there is a possible Nuclear crisis arising, genocide in Palestine, an economic change and our unavoidable voyage towards the global Malthusian Catastrophe? One can see the typically sardonic, cynical Irish humor involved in Malthusian naming their record after a play by someone who already envisioned the world going to the dogs at the hands of the lowest form of mankind.
The Irish quartet gives us their second full-length (seven years after the release of their debut Across Death) and one can nicely divide into the intro, tracks two through six and then the final two with ”Amongst the Swarms of Vermin” being the watershed between the first six and the last two; its running time of more than fifteen minutes and then the ensuing outro ”In Chaos, Exult” are to be seen as one entity. However, one should not think this divide to be a clear cut or that the parts differ a lot from each other. The intro ”Isolation” already holds several of the elements that constitute the final track, so there is a nice flow from the end into the beginning. The doomier side of things is never neglected by the band comprised of the two original members – Altar of Plagues drummer Johnny King and guitarist/vocalist Matt Bree who are joined on the new record by Grave Miasma guitarist Tom McKenna and new bassist Federico Benini. The Summoning Bell is a record for Death Metal fans who are hungry for some new Blackened shade of their fave genre – you get tracks full of utter darkness which at first glance sound as if Greg Chandler had fallen asleep when producing it. Nonetheless, when giving the record another spin, one can easily discover certain different shades of black. Some are a bit groovier than the others, many are pitch-black and will boil the blood of connoisseurs of the genre, and the titanic tentacle work of Johnny cannot be praised enough, because when Malthusian started, he (and none of the other members of the band) had ever played this kind of music. It was basically learning by doing. Of course their status as experienced musicians helped to create such a huge monolith of a record, one that you have to climb to see and understand from above, but stacking gargantuan riff upon gargantuan riff and being able to differentiate between all of them already seems like a trip most of us would never set out to do.
This record is not a nice pad on the back. It is a detonation on your spine by someone who is trying to punch through to the other side and at the same time is doing so with a hysterical laughter ringing in your ear like the bell to end the final days. Let’s laugh into the face of the apocalypse!
[* (sorry, it was late and I couldn’t keep myself)]
