Artist: Tyrannic
Country: Australia
Label: Iron Bonehead Productions
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2024
One of the most musically interesting bands from the celebrated Iron Bonehead Productions stables must definitely be Australia’s Tyrannic. Over the past decade the band has treated us to their otherworldly Black Metal. For a change, however, it is not about being progressive or venturing into Cascadian Black Metal territories, quite on the contrary even. Tyrannic harkens back to the very early stages of the Black Metal genre and laces it heavily with classic Doom- and Heavy Metal characteristics.
In the interview I did with the band some 18 months ago, main composer Tyrannic Deluge mentioned their primary musical influences: “Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Iron Maiden, Burzum, Von, Satyricon, Desaster (‘A Touch of Medieval Darkness’), Nazxul, Deathspell Omega’s ‘Infernal Battles’, Samael, diSEMBOWELMENT, Morbid Angel, Black Sabbath, Reverend Bizarre, Cathedral and Beherit”. And, frankly, that indeed pretty much sums up what Tyrannic is all about. Quite literally; if you’d throw in bits and pieces of all that and crank up the concrete mixer you basically get what Tyrannic has been doing in the past decade and a bit.
Yet, while ‘Mortuus Decadence’, the band’s latest album from 2021, and all preceding work had a thoroughly doomy spirit, indeed much alike Reverend Bizarre, ‘Tyrannic Desolation’ feels like a slight departure from that tried and tested formula. It would go too far to claim that we’re dealing with something significantly different, but still… Comparing to the majority of the previously released recordings, on this new album there is an identifiable decline of the “Reverend Bizarre”-part from Tyrannic’s musical DNA.
Consequently, ‘Tyrannic Desolation,’ with its even stronger Hellhammer/Celtic Frost and Samael parallels, is an even more pronounced Black Metal record. That doesn’t mean the doomy side of the band has disappeared completely, but it did take on a distinctly different role in the mix. In a way, the Black Metal and Doom Metal parts have grown more towards each other and at some points have even become totally intertwined. That means that, in the process, the album feels quite a bit more coherent and even, dare I say, more accessible. Still, basically everything that made Tyrannic standout of the pack is still very much present on ‘Tyrannic Desolation’. Everything is just sort of tossed and rearranged.
The album, however, starts out with a rocking Heavy Metal-tinged track that has quite a bit of that unorthodox Tyrannic-flavour to it, as the album progresses they go increasingly more into the depths of Black Metal. Still the doomy character of the band pops up a bit more prominently, such as on the great and Cathedral-oriented ‘Only Death Can Speak My Name’. Further proof that the doom and gloom has not completely disappeared from the recipe, but it also proves that the music should be enjoyed more as a whole. That’s where that cohesion comes back in, stronger than ever the steel cables of the Tyrannic concept hold up against trends and overly easy-sounding disposable Black Metal.
So, bottom line here could be that the music of Tyrannic, while slightly different now, is still very hard to catch into a few simple words – let alone to label them with anything that does fully justice to the music. Instead, it basically all comes down to the feeling and overall atmosphere of the music. So, whatever analysis you make, what you may or may not hear in it, the music of Tyrannic is still pretty much unparalleled. If the unconventional style of the previous records appealed to you, you certainly shouldn’t be skipping this new album. To me, this is perhaps the band’s strongest album to date.
