SXUPERION - Cosmic Void

Sxuperion – Cosmic Void (2016, Bloody Mountain Records)

After a very solid split album with Verräter released last year, one man band Sxuperion is now releasing Cosmic Void an offering of five songs of pure contempt for humanity and its immature presence in the whole universe.

As I observed in my review of the aformentioned split, Sxuperion, or Matthew, has blended many elements of both Black and Death Metal. I even compared it to Wolves In The Throne Room but I would push it a bit further and go with a parallel with Krallice’s Avant-garde Metal to get closer to Sxuperion’s sound. Coming out of California, Sxuperion is making contemporary Metal that incorporates touches of many genres of the Extreme Metal territory. The dissonant assault of the drums and guitars together form a wall of sound that characterizes the American Black Metal movement. Depending on its use the music at first seems and is saturated with dense sound and repeated notes without sounding amateur or thrown in an incoherent mix.

What’s interesting with Sxuperion is that it takes from so many subgenres together and seems to don’t care about genres or musical conventions. Just like a madman who takes many little animals and put them into a giant blender to make a soup out of them. It would give you bits and parts here and there that you could recognize but that would disorient you as the listener or the taster for quite some time. The velocity is quite phenomenal and even if it’s repetitions of the same note for long times, it creates a simple texture that the guitars seem to compensate with dreamy riffs. Despite the modern day American Black Metal comparisons of the first paragraph, the sound of Cosmic Void as for me the same effective simplicity that DarkThrone achieved with their masterpiece Transylvanian Hunger. The creation of such a unique atmosphere on an album could have been clumsy in its finality but Sxuperion has a quality added to that a very heavy production that sounds destructive at least. The samplings, are not my thing and I kind of think they break the pace of an album and for me they are not making a better mood.

Finally, this is a very ‘’underground Metal’’ record and it will meet fans in the extremes of many subgenres but it is not an accessible album. However, this is one of the reasons why I think this is advanced music and also one of the albums I consider as the best since the debut of 2016.

8.4