“Flesh offered gladly to a smiling god of nothing.”
Pure garbage disposal facelift death metal with a particularly heavy emphasis on bass has become somewhat of a sparse offering as of late. To an extent, it’s understandable. Many contemporary groups discovered Cynic and Opeth and promptly decided prog was the way. But for every three or so Rivers of Nihil, there’s at least one Ancient Rivalry. Nearly bereft of any compromising respites, it acts like Ancient Rivalry that exist solely to rip your insides out and force-feed you the leftovers. Furthermore, their debut, WHAT LIVES BENEATH, isn’t just another run-of-the-mill, unga bunga death metal record, but a rather technical showcase to boot. If you were at all curious about what an eight-track meshing of Cannibal Corpse‘s relentless pace and Cryptopsy‘s technicality results in, Ancient Rivalry spends every waking second of WHAT LIVES BENEATH entrenching us in their murky abyss, pulling off every conceivably brutal genre staple whilst resoundingly maintaining bone-crushing originality.
Ancient Rivalry serves a litany of hooks, blast beats, pinch harmonics, and solos, all packed into thirty minutes of smoldering groove. There’s nothing ostentatious about their approach on WHAT LIVES BENEATH, even when the technical scales are tilted into the deepest recesses of highly varied song structure. Whether it’s the opening, titular track’s frenzied fret work, or the blistering chugs on “DROWNED IN HUMAN FILTH”, WHAT LIVES BENEATH continuously toes the line between Beneath the Massacre‘s Mechanics of Dysfunction and Dying Fetus‘s Stop At Nothing, to the point where stylistic interchangeability becomes its bread and butter. In every sense, this is an essential listen for those who are looking for a model balance between tech and brutal death.
In cases such as this, where influences are constantly shifting from section to section, drumming is all the more pivotal. “SIEGE ETERNAL” and “ROTTED CROWN“, relative to an already-overwhelming barrage of kicks and snare throughout WHAT LIVES BENEATH, shift everything into sixth gear for Ancient Rivalry. If anything can simulate ravenous demons using your cranium as a speedbag for a half hour, WHAT LIVES BENEATH certainly, if nothing else, comes pretty damn close in the chops department. As part of any physical releases, Ancient Rivalry should divulge whatever their workout routines are.
Raw execution is what sets the foundational strength of WHAT LIVES BENEATH, and the production is what elevates it. This record not only concerns the underworld from a thematic standpoint, but also sonically embodies its despairing constitution. As each second passes, Ancient Rivalry iteratively mashes us into a mangled pulp with no buffer for reformation. And they say you need the right equipment for this kind of music to sound good; WHAT LIVES BENEATH would reduce you to a pile of ash even if it was consumed with call center headphones. The engineering is that fucking crisp.
Even still, WHAT LIVES BENEATH could stand to be heavier. There are exceedingly sporadic junctures of prog-adjacent sensibilities, with “HUNGER OF THE DEAD” employing the most noticeable instance of this. Perhaps that is the aging purist speaking, or maybe given how unfathomably suffocating WHAT LIVES BENEATH already is, a pedantic nitpick rooted in brutal death-induced dopamine hunger. Either way, this hardly, if at all, diminishes what Ancient Rivalry have achieved right out of the gate. Cases of cessation are so few and far between that many likely won’t even notice when the throttle is kicked back.
An ode to classic, brutal, and tech death alike, WHAT LIVES BENEATH is a massive fresh breath of necrotizing air that pulls purely from the fundamentals of the genre. Nothing flashy or fancy about Ancient Rivalry‘s debut, outside of the blood eagle it metaphorically paints, exists to lessen its impact. Beyond whatever follows next for the London outfit, we can only hope, by extension, that more acts follow the crimson blueprint that WHAT LIVES BENEATH unearthed.
