Australians from Canberra, PLOUGHSHARE return to the scene with their apocalyptic, dissonant black/death metal. In “Second Wound,” the third full-length album, the band continues in the wake of the “Tellurian Insurgency” EP, expanding its sound on the basis of the goals achieved with the previous experimental album, “Ingested Burial Ground”, characterized by large doses of electronic and harsh noise. In other words, PLOUGHSHARE have managed to amalgamate the cacophonous black/death of the early days with their late industrial drifts, if possible pushing themselves into even darker and more terrifying extreme metal territories.
Mastered by the excellent Colin Marston, PLOUGHSHARE’s tortuous sonic trajectories drag us through the enigmatic chaos of PORTAL and the uncontainable violence of SADISTIK EXEKUTION. The bass work is impressive; during moments of apparent calm it even seems to draw elegant jazz embroideries, but what prevails above all are dark and pernicious atmospheres that transmit to the listener a sense of suffocation, suffering and imminent death.
Inspired by anchoress Julian of Norwich’s “Revelations of Divine Love”, a medieval book of Christian mystical devotions, PLOUGHSHARE’s “Second Wound” is undoubtedly one of the darkest, most magmatic and genuinely disturbing black/death metal records you’ve ever heard.
