Massacra

Obsolete – Animate//Isolate Review

Obsolete – Animate//Isolate Review

“I’ve spent much of this year listening to Obituary and Mortician. Both are death metal, but death metal is a wide field and you can’t mistake either band’s sound for the other’s. To address this, we put bands into subgenres within a subgenre – Floridian death metal, for instance. This is nice because I don’t want to sift through a bunch of Entombed clones to find something like Monstrosity. What about when our subgenres within subgenres cease to be useful to describe a sound? Then we get stuff like slam, which is brutal death metal played a specific way – a subgenre of a subgenre within a subgenre. If you’re thinking that Obsolete’s debut Animate//Isolate will lead me down a sub-sub-sub-genre rabbit hole, go ahead and give yourself an executive producer credit.” Old tech.

Rapture – Paroxysm of Hatred Review

Rapture – Paroxysm of Hatred Review

“Everyone pictures themselves as the protagonist. Ask one hundred people what they’d do in a zombie apocalypse and they’ll all give you the same answer: survive. And yet, someone has to be that guy who gets mauled right near the beginning of the outbreak, or who foolishly stands near a window and is promptly eaten alive by the horde, squirming helplessly for their last miserable minutes. Nobody thinks they’re cannon fodder; that is something proven and earned by an individual. Paroxysm of Hatred, the sophomore release from Greece’s Rapture, have proven themselves to be just that.” No, not THAT Rapture.

Slaughterer – Conjurer of Realities [Things You Might Have Missed 2017)

Slaughterer – Conjurer of Realities [Things You Might Have Missed 2017)

“Despite being a huge fan of death-thrash, I wind up feeling and sounding more like a curmudgeonly Goldilocks when I write about the stuff. It’s not fast enough, it’s not thrashy enough, it’s not death-y enough, there aren’t enough of those devastating Slayer-style slowdowns, and on and on ad infinitum. Naturally, I began to worry: was it me? Have I outgrown death-thrash?” No one outgrows death-thrash until death.

Mortuary – Nothingless than Nothingness Review

Mortuary – Nothingless than Nothingness Review

“In Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, there’s a section called Skirmishes of an Untimely Man. In France’s metal scene, there’s a group called Mortuary whose career may as well have been called Expeditions of an Untimely Band. Unleashing their first full-length in 1996, already eight years old as a band, their deathy and thrashy style was long since out of vogue and death metal had moved on to graze in different pastures. They also managed to release a whopping four whole full-length records in the span of twenty-five years.” The slow knife cuts the deepest.