This is the record that reignited my interest in extreme metal after a decade or so. "Lunarterial" is terrifying. It evokes the feelings of dread and apprehension that extreme metal is supposed to evoke. There are so few metal records that do this anymore. Too often, extreme metal is comfort listening, wallpaper music based on tropes that we have heard a million times. Swallowed took a different approach. They succeeded because they created a genuinely extreme record. “Lunarterial” will disorientate you and chill you to the bone, just like those double eyes on the front cover (a perfect image for the music itself). Musically, Swallowed merged the death/doom of bands like Evoken with the blackened, primitive sounds of Blasphemy and Beherit. These two sub-genres have little in common. The former builds atmosphere through measured, monolithic progress. The latter thrives on speed, chaos and savagery. I've not heard this combination before. Old death/doom bands like Esoteric and Disembowelment featured grindcore-esque blast-beat sections, but I never liked those sections much. I much prefer what Swallowed did with their more evil, chaotic, blackened sound. They moved more fluidly between these worlds than any band before them. "Lunarterial" is ragged, unpredictable stuff. These songs teeter on the edge of falling, but manage to claw themselves back from the precipice. Nowhere is this better shown than with the guitar solos. Some of the solos on this album are wild and expressionistic. They burst with supernatural energy and they make no musical sense. Other solos are the exact opposite; repetitive, two-note incantations, stretched out for as long as possible. The solo at the end of "Reverence Through Darkness" begins slowly, transforming into dissonance and then into chaos. It sounds amazing. The overall highlight is "Black Aura", and the two note motif that runs through the song. It is almost Swans-like in its brute simplicity, and among the most sinister metal songs I’ve ever heard. The one significant problem is the final song ("Libations"). This is 25 minutes of monotonous, directionless nonsense. This is where the album falls flat on its face. Imagine a child learning to ride a bicycle. The child maintains balance for a few moments before either stopping or losing balance and falling onto the pavement. For every other song on the album, Swallowed stopped before they fell. For “Libations”, they fall after about five minutes, and spend the next 20 minutes tangled up on the floor with the bicycle, still peddling. This is not an epic in any sense of the word, it is a long, extended mistake. Bands like Evoken were able to compose longer songs because they played a more measured style of death/doom. Swallowed sounds like chaos incarnate. This is their secret, but also their weakness for something like "Libations". This album would have been even better if Swallowed had cut that song. The dark trip of "Black Phlegm" would have made an excellent album closer. The band could have saved all the half-baked ideas on "Libations" and re-worked them into riffs for another album. Unfortunately, they never followed this album and the name of Swallowed has remained in relative obscurity. This music may be too extreme and unorthodox for most, but it should gain a cult following in a few years' time. No-one has blended death, black and doom metal in such a way before. Maybe Swallowed will rise again one day and conquer all.
