Reviews

INFERI Of Sunless Realms

WATCH OUT. The circle pit’s about to slam. Inferi unleashes a ferocious assault of monstrous metal on the band’s latest EP, Of Sunless Realms.

The release, and the extreme metal style in general, can be polarizing for listeners, and reaction to the sounds of Inferi will have a lot to do with one’s preexisting personal taste in rock music.

Metal masterminds Malcolm Pugh and Mike Low play blazing arpeggios, sweeps, patterns and licks; quick, technical and nimble guitar passages of an incredibly high degree of instrumental diffi culty. A ridiculously fast double kick drum pounds through a good bit of the compositions, punctuated by some spooky synths.

The demonic cookie monster vocals will be off-putting for many, though. The painfully screaming vocal style serves as a signature of the death-metal and black-metal niches, but surely chases off a good percentage of listeners who may give the music more of a chance if overlaid with a different vocal style. If a sense of terror, anger and disconcertment is the target, Inferi nails it.

As brutal and overbearing as it is, Inferi’s music really is symphonic in parts, very advanced and sophisticated melodically on the guitar breaks, sweeps and interludes.

“It’s death metal of the highest order,” one Inferi supporter said. “Well executed metal.”

“Aeons Torn” displays a neat, very quick arpeggiation pattern plinking along and peppering the composition.

The guitar work throughout gives some nods to founders of metal such as Metallica, Slayer, Iron Maiden and company, with epic, soaring guitar breaks blended with modern Scandinavian-infl uenced black- and deathmetal sounds with a dash of DragonForce (instrumentally).

Occasionally, the music does display a groove underlying its seemingly untamable brutality. The ending passage of “Eldritch Evolution,” which goes with more of a half-time head-nodding tempo rather than such blisteringly fast speed-metal throughout, should get many moving and swaying.

“The Summoning” serves as a brief, lowerintensity ear break with its haunting piano, organ and chorus. But the main purpose here really seems to be to lead the listener into the remaining pit of shredding brutality.

The cover artwork for Of Sunless Realms fi ts just perfectly with the style; it features wild, multi-eyed, massive, tentacled monsters, fi re, scenes of hellish destruction and a cadre of cloaked fi gures, along with, of course, a custom Inferi logo displaying the band name in a nearly indecipherable font—a traditional badge of honor in the extreme metal community, nearly as hard to interpret as the lyrics.

Despite occasional use of piano, creepy, quieter synth interludes and the occasional stomping groove, Of Sunless Realms doesn’t exactly contain a great deal of crossover appeal. The vocals come across, by design, as abrasive, to say the least. Some, understandably, can’t take it.

But there’s an existing scene for heartpounding, thunderously galloping metal fury, and Inferi continues to earn respect in the metal community.

Find Of Sunless Realms by Inferi on Bandcamp, Spotify and other online platforms. — BRACKEN MAYO

SAVE YOURSELVES! DIRECTOR Alex Huston

Fischer and Eleanor Wilson

STARRING Sunita Mani,

John Reynolds, Ben Sinclair

RATED R

SAVE YOURSELVES! IS YET another under-the-radar gem to show up for rent on Amazon Prime during these trying times for movie theaters and movie studios. Firsttime feature directors Fischer and Wilson surprise and delight with this low-budget sci-fi comedy.

The fi lm is carried by its two leads. John Reynolds and Sunita Mani as Jack and Su are an early thirties couple from Brooklyn scrolling their way through their lives and their relationship. At a party, they catch up with an old friend (High Maintenance’s Ben Sinclair) who offers them his family cabin for a week. Jack and Su jump at the opportunity to get away and unplug, to mentally reboot their lives. Once there, Jack and Su struggle to exist phone-free, while Su attempts to explore their relationship with a list of activities she found on a website and copied into a notebook. It’s while arguing about whether the list constitutes breaking their cellphone sabbatical that they notice a fl uffy pouffe in the cabin that wasn’t there before. When they fi nally turn on their phones again, they’re met with numerous texts and voicemails that, without spoiling too much, prove the pouffe—a furball-shaped alien creature—does not come in peace.

For a fi lm that revolves around just two characters, Reynolds and Mani are perfectly cast. Reynolds (Search Party) typically plays the hate-able hipster to a T, but as Jack he embodies the fl oundering yet complacent modern city dweller. He wishes he knew plumbing even though he actively rebelled against his workmanlike father. Mani (GLOW) is equally unskilled, and even says as much. She’s great as Su, who just feels in a rut and wants to get out of it before she wakes up at 60 having done nothing with her life. Though these topics sound heavy, Jack and Su together (and the sharp script by the directors) make these relatable struggles somehow light and breezy. In a typically disarming scene, Jack and Su are sitting on their couch while he looks at his phone as it plays Cate Le Bon’s enchanting song “Are You With Me Now” (appropriate). Su, in a moment of frustration, slaps the phone out of Jack’s hand. Stunned, Jack turns to look at her and says, “Thank you.”

There are countless scenes like this that are both funny and real, even as the sci-fi silliness ramps up to catastrophic levels. As Jack and Su’s search for serenity turns into a fi ght for survival, Save Yourselves! takes many unexpected turns, all the while staying grounded in the main characters’ fl awed, and often hilarious, humanity. — JAY SPIGHT

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