Artist: Concrete Winds
Country: Finland
Label: Sepulchral Voice Records
Formats: LP / Cassette Tape / CD
Year: 2024
After Vorum was laid to rest in 2018, drummer Mikko Josefsson and guitarist/vocalist Jonatan Johansson must have looked at each other and seen a moment of understanding in each other’s gaze. Vorum was already not exactly for the faint of heart, but when the duo moved on together as Concrete Winds, they jettisoned all vestiges of finesse and overall good taste. On the band’s first two albums we have already met a sonic genre-transcending whirlwind that knows very few equals, with this self-titled third album they are going for the ultimate knock out.
On the previous albums the band has shown that their music can appeal to anyone into extreme music, whether you are into Death Metal, Black Metal or Grindcore: Concrete Winds was offering a musical kick to each of you. Still Concrete Winds sounds like as if Morbid Angel and Black Witchery jamming onto some Repulsion songs. In well under half an hour ‘Concrete Winds’ is serving you some utterly wild, rabid and vitriolic Extreme Metal that doesn’t really need any specific labelling.
Bulldozing and suffocating in its breakneck speed, the noisy production and the vocal insanity… it might not make it all too easy to swallow for the average Death-Metal-by-numbers fan. Yet, if you are always on the look out for the next most extreme record, I would wholeheartedly suggest to check out this third record. If you have been blown away by ‘Primitive Foce’ (2019) and ‘Nerve Butcherer’ (2021) you know at least a bit of what is coming for you on this record, but it is safe to say that ‘Concrete Winds’ is a culmination of what both preceding records had on offer. Sonically even more relentless and the slightly clearer (and less grinding) sound gives the guitars a firmly sharper edge. But this also leaves a bit more room for asphyxiating dissonances and the (scarce) slower moments to have a more abyssal impact.
There’s, obviously, still not a moment in which the listener is getting a proper breather, yet there certainly are a few bits in which “the riff” is a getting a bit more of a prominent role. Listen to ‘Infernal Repeater’ or its follow up ‘Subterranean Persuasion’ for example, both have a very strong Morbid Angel echo to it, something that holds the middle in between ‘Altars Of Madness’ and ‘Formulas Fatal To The Flesh’. Also the peerless Morbid Angel/Angelcorpse-like solo wizardry is adding to the overall frenzy.
Whatever way you slice it, in the span of just a few years, Concrete Winds has managed to carve out a niche of its own. There are few bands that convincingly can unleash such a dose of breathtaking aggression, controlled chaos and overall sonic destruction. If you think you can handle it then ‘Concrete Winds’ is (again) a record not to be missed, if you thought the previous two albums were a bit too much of a stretch: then by all means don’t bother.
