AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SUMMON

If you have been searching for the soundtrack to your worst nightmares, you have come to the right place. What we have for you today is a full stream of Helios, the new EP by the three Portuguese black/death demons who call themselves Summon. Consisting of three horrifying assaults on the senses, Helios will be released on February 2nd under the hammer of Godz Ov War Productions.

For those unfamiliar with Summon, their two preceding releases were the Aesthetics of Demise EP in 2017 and the Parazv Il Zilittv full-length in 2018. As those records have already revealed, but this new EP demonstrates without question, Summon are not content merely to deliver barbaric assaults of battle-zone chaos (which they do quite powerfully). Their music equally creates atmospheres of unearthly malignancy and apocalyptic doom.

The three tracks on the EP are simply denominated by Roman numerals, and what follows are impressions of them, as a way of forewarning you about what you’re getting yourselves into.

HELIOS I

At the outset, massive, corrosively distorted chords groan and degrade the senses, as a methodical snare-crack snaps the listener’s neck. The grotesque bestial vocals veer from horrid roars to completely unhinged screams, and the drums erupt in thunderous fusillades as the riffing becomes a mauling and malignant force, enveloping the senses in catastrophes of sound. Eerie leads pierce the storm in shrill shrieking tones. Periodically, the drummer accelerates into increasingly maniacal but still sharply executed attacks — or falls silent to allow the guitars to pour out a thick ichor of desolating misery. Writhing fretwork channels a kind of terrifying delirium, and near the end the vocals fall into a chilling chant even as the music becomes a typhoon of destruction.

HELIOS II

In contrast to the finale of “Helios I”, “Helios II” begins in a doom-drenched slog, sucking the listener into a swamp of congealing blood and decaying corpses. The music is oppressive and suffocating, but the track displays the band’s proven taste for dynamism as gunfire bursts from the snare and gales of filthy, grinding riffage scour the mind, while the vocals continue to veer from ghastly roars to lunatic shrieks. When the song slows, the reverberations of the chords chew at the bones and weird, wailing leads manifest as the chilling sound of desolate apparitions drifting and crying out in the ether.

HELIOS III

The mauling and mutilating sounds of riffing masquerading as titanic demolition machinery open the long final track, alternating with the swarming vibrations of cruel and crazed fretwork. Those viciously buzzing tones have a despairing yet sadistic quality, and the echoing horrors emanating from inhuman throats and alien guitar emanations continue to produce a blood-freezing effect — although the rampant clatter and spleen-rupturing pound of the drums strike with physical force.

In the song’s mid-section, guitar notes ring out like paranormal chimes, subsiding into cold ambient wind and a literal cornucopia of grotesque vocal terrors, as if ushering us through an inter-dimensional house of horrors, plunging us into a Pandora’s box of nightmarish evils, or locking us into a hellish torture chamber where we are consigned to dwell until the EP’s end.