Leaning on everything from horror movies to medical science and general human nastiness, New York death metallers Undeath return with the much anticipated follow-up to their 2020 debut Lesions of a Different Kind. Using the lockdown period during the pandemic to (de)compose new material, the band pays homage to the past as well as mining from the present on murderous second full-length release It’s Time… To Rise From The Grave (Prosthetic Records).

With results far less putrid and foul-smelling than the purulence and depravity that inspire them, Undeath are out of the traps fast, opener ‘Fiend for Corpses’ gnashing it’s yellow teeth and launching itself at you like a pack of rabid dogs. The lurching, rhythmic fury of ‘Defiled Again’ pummels relentlessly into your skull with punishing double-kicks, splintering bone as it delivers a merciless assault only to be followed by the equally unrelenting ‘Rise from the Grave’, guitarists Kyle Beam and Jared Welch slicing their way through flesh with barbed wire solos and razorblade riffs.

‘Necrobionics’ is a pulverisingly upbeat exercise in old school brutality while ‘Enhancing The Dead’ and ‘Funeral Within’ is what happens when bassist Tommy Wall is handed a sledgehammer and the keys to an old people’s home. The charmingly titled ‘Head Splattered in Seven Ways’ really couldn’t be a more appropriate description of the carnage contained within its jagged grooves if it tried while drummer Matt Browning turns ‘Human Chandelier’ into the frenzied attack of an escaped psychopath. ‘Bone Wrought’ finds vocalist Alexander Jones reaching even lower levels of sludge-coated gutturality before the apocalyptic devastation reaches its exhausting conclusion on ‘Trampled Headstones’, a closing track designed to squeeze any remaining droplets of energy from your tortured body and then slowly and painfully poison you to death with them. The only (minor) complaint here is that the song is allowed to fade slowly away rather than climax with the finality of an appropriately crushing death blow.

From Browning’s cover art and pleasingly indecipherable death metal logo to Scoops Dardaris‘s production, everything on It’s Time… is polished enough for newer death metal fans but still murky and putrescent enough to appeal to old schoolers. 

A constant flow of riffs and time changes allow for no lapse in interest as the band come at you straight from the Cannibal Corpse school of death metal. Slurry-filled vocals borrowed from Autopsy converge with piercing solos, low end hammer-ons and groove powered sections which sound like Morbid Angel meeting Carcass and Mortician in a fatal high-speed collision. All of which does nothing but lend a gnarled and rotted helping hand to Undeath’s bloodsoaked cause.

Buy the album here: https://lnk.to/UNDEATH

8 / 10

GARY ALCOCK