Much like someone coming off a vacation or long flight home, Coffin Rot take a while to find their footing.
The new Death Metal album Dreams Of The Disturbed (Maggot Stomp) needs three or four songs before it seems to get settled in and ready to go, and by that time, it’s already too late.Continue reading
With the underground death metal scene continuing to grow at an exponential rate, there’s nothing quite like announcing yourself with a full blown conceptual theme in order to stand out from the rest of the herd. Continue reading
It is fitting that 2024 finds the resurgence of death metal gathering even more momentum as death spreads across the globe. Death is a logical progression to the cycle of life, so death metal should be a celebration of this. Paul Speckmann has shown up to this celebration with this 14th album as Master. At sixty, he shows little sign of slowing down. Is it more deliberate than their 1990 album? Yes, but the songwriting is more polished. This album is a study on the roots of death metal, so prepare to take notes, there will be a quiz.Continue reading
A mere two full-lengths in, Finnish Death Metal outfit Sepulchral Curse sound and feel right at home with what they’re out to accomplish and Abhorrent Dimensions (Transcending Obscurity) digs deep into the annals of grotesquery and emerges as a festering titan of slop.
Autopsy is a band that understands itself. Like spiritual death metal brethren Cannibal Corpse, the band has core musical, thematic and visual staples you can almost always depend on (the poo-chomping album cover of Shitfun being an outlier). Think Autopsy, think the evil, Black Sabbath-inspired tri-tones, pulverising percussion, slow, menacing crawls blended with charging gallops, malevolent guitar lines, bowel-loosening bass, squealing bursts of lead guitar and rasping vocals, all tied up in a bloody bow of bodies being monstrously torn to pieces.
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.
In an ever-increasingly rich and exciting underground Death Metal scene in the UK, Celestial Sanctuary have been a prominent standard bearer and the ones most likely to break out to bigger things. 2021’s Soul Diminished was a case of a very strong debut album which also showed strong potential to be realised and was backed up with some feverishly received live outings, with the band maximising their opportunities with the likes of Undeath, so expectations on the follow up were always going to be high. Expectations which have been well and truly smashed with the immensely realised Insatiable Thirst For Torment (Church Road Records).
Artificial intelligence is a concept seemingly ever-present in the modern day. But nobody talks about when musical instruments become sentient and develop their own mannerisms and consciousness.
Continuing the theme which occupied much of 2021’s Resurgence (Nuclear Blast) album, Floridian death metal act Massacre returns with four more tracks based on the works of influential Rhode Island science fiction horror author HP Lovecraft.
The guitars are mud caked in a morass of molasses. The vocal performance is, dare I say, a clinic on how to spew the wretched filth that is old school Death Metal. The omnipresent drums never interfere but simply carve out the route for the rest to follow. Stir all that up in a cauldron with a hint of disgust and a touch of revulsion and the end result is Genocide Pact’s newest self-titled album (Relapse Records), and with it, eight tracks of nineties-era muck and grime.