Brutal Technical Death Metal begins and ends with Suffocation.
Full stop.
The titans of industry have had a stranglehold on the masses for decades now. Hymns From The Apocrypha (Nuclear Blast Records) is simply a six-years-in-the-waiting culmination of a desire to continue to reign supreme. Even with the half-decade wait between records, any amount of time between Suffocation releases feels like an eternity.
Get ready, folks: brute ‘n roll is upon us!
Progressive yet brutal Death Metal deviants Afterbirth, formed in 1993 but put on hold for two decades, are primed and ready for the world to hear their brand of bellicosity.
If the sonic ambush and equilibrium-busting nature of Body Void’s Atrocity Machine (Prosthetic Records) didn’t make it clear enough: the world has been ass-backwards basically since humanity began to human.
A mere two years removed from the fifty-minute colossus that is Primordial Arcana, Wolves In The Throne Room have undertaken a full 180 with Crypt Of Ancestral Knowledge (Relapse Records). The four-track extended play is spearheaded by “Beholden To Clan”, and is supplemented by three instrumental-dominant tracks.
If there’s one redeeming quality to Carnifex’s new record, it’s guitarist and relative newcomer Neal Tiemann. The string slayer’s adept finger-tapping during boisterous guitar solos does its best to keep Necromanteum (Nuclear Blast Records) afloat despite a myriad of deficiencies.
Technical progressive Death Metal trailblazers Tomb Mold must have known they had something remarkably special on their hands when label 20 Buck Spin announced out of nowhere on social media that The Enduring Spirit would be released.
Scientists generally agree that the Big Bang, which occurred roughly 13.7 billion years ago, kick-started the creation of the universe as we know it today. Well, now we also know what the Big Bang sounded like.
It certainly says something about a slamming Death Metal band when they’re able to both breed heaviness organically and give the listener a sense of being in good, capable hands throughout the onslaught.
For ten years, Head Cleaner stewed in the grindcore pot, leaving fans wondering what was in store next. The product of that decade of inactivity is an eleven-track, sub-twenty-five-minute onslaught that eloquently calls back to the origins of grindcore and the pioneers who paved the way for such an extreme sub-genre.
Allow me to go out on a limb here: the bathroom floor of a frat house on a Saturday night/Sunday morning has less bacteria and filth than Thorn’s newest record. But don’t be fooled into thinking Evergloom (Transcending Obscurity Records) is solely reliant on gag-inducing landscapes. The collective is armed with an innate ability to devise structured songs that possess personality and conjure truly frightening thoughts.