Album review: Flaming Wrekage – Terra Inferna

By DAN SOUTHALL

POST the modern plague and the Australian metal scene has arisen in a way I don’t remember for some time. Hailing from Sydney, Flaming Wrekage have wasted little time planting their flag in the ears of anyone willing to pay attention, with Terra Inferna being their fourth album.

Taking no pauses for intros, the band begin beating in your eardrums with vocalist Dave Lupton’s dry, gravely delivery spitting lyrics at you before the band kick off on opener “Witch Hunt”. This is very quickly and ably followed up with “Nightmare Architect”, a thrashier number as Flaming Wrekage show a love for all things Slayer related.

“Hell On Earth” is the best track on the album, with the band throwing everything at it. Stop-start rhythms, haunting guitars and everything just short of full deathcore, all melded together into a metallic, soupy mix that best puts on display what they are capable of.

Wispy and clean guitars lull you into a false sense of mid-album interlude before they come back with a mid-paced rager that would make Robb Flynn of Machine Head smile, with rich guitar leads and a stomping backing that will have you accidently head banging on the bus to work. The standard number gives way to the chaos of “Ghosts”. Beginning as just another thrash track, it weaves some sludge swamp through the middle and builds up to heavy hitter status before dying in a haze of guitar fuzz.

From here the album flashes past for the next two tracks before album closer “Our Own Blood” reawakens the ears as it again twists and turns from its clean acoustic guitar fade in to hammering kick drums and everything in between before the acoustic farewell. The final track on the album manages to go harder and in less time than some of the previous ones.

This is another Australian band doing good things – and with an album such as this they might start getting international knocks on their door.