‘Hides the lie that corrupted all your inside, Hides a code you could never crack, Hides a road you would never walk, While you sit in the joy of your reluctance, Wrath reloads its gun’ (Synchronicity)

Hailing from Rome, Sect Mark are back with their second full-length, Self-Obliteration, and follow-up to 2018’s Worship.  And have no fear, we are in for another dose of unbridled hardcore fury.  Raw, venomous, echo tinged vocals are intertwined with darkly menacing guitars and a ruthlessly precise rhythm section to create a bleakly dystopian atmosphere.

The album takes its philosophical lead from the Arthur Rimbaud poem Fêtes de la Faim (Feast of Hunger): ‘Eat, the stones that a poor man breaks, The old church masonry, Boulders, children of the floods, Loaves lying in the grey valleys’.  It primes the album’s urgent, primal call for change that manifests itself in the visceral, poetically violent lyrical imagery of social unrest and conflict as captured by Hand Don’t Feed (‘You gave us nothing, now we’ll pay back, Hand don’t feed, it never did’) and Denied Self (‘And all parades are beautiful when you end up hanged’).

The squalling, stomping opener, Traitor, sets the scene perfectly for the rabid barrage that follows.  Other stand-out moments include the barbarous eruption that is Fracture and the searing riffage that defines the utterly fierce Leech and Denied Self.