“I’ve been riding a wave of very good death metal promos recently, and since it would be sheer madness to walk away from the table when you’re beating the house, I’m doubling down. How could I not grab Through a Warren of Shadow, the debut record from Azath, when it has a sweet image of a stately mountain-perched dragon on the cover?” With logic like that, what could go wrong?
“Don’t you just love it when something is so clearly represented by a single image or title? Yeah, me too. That’s why I blindly selected Filtheater’s debut record Blight of Sempiternal Putrefaction from the Bin ov Promos. That cover. That logo. That title. All of it screams dirty, grimy, raw death metal.” So greasy!
“Eating is metal. We survive by threshing matter to an unrecognizable paste, forcing it down a lightless cavern and then, in the darkness, boiling it in acid. The act of feeding ourselves encapsulates the blend of violence, intensity and profundity we reach at when we use ‘metal’ as an adjective. Horrisonous drive this point liver-deep with their debut full length, A Culinary Cacophony. Its members have been slinging death around the Sydney scene in bands such as Temple Nightside, Backyard Mortuary, and Illimitable Dolor, and they’ve put their overstuffed CVs to work chopping, searing, and seasoning a viscous trough of old school death metal.” It’s a gutter buffet.
“In the 1980s and ‘90s, death metal greats like Asphyx, Grave, Bolt Thrower, and Entombed established the template for what the genre would be. And it’s tough to be a death metal band 20 or 30 years later competing with the iconic albums released by these giants of the scene. Italy’s Organic lists these greats as the influences for their debut outing Carved in Flesh.” The first rule of writing is to never overstate your case. Who here is worried that Organic is maybe a little out of their depths?
“Newcastle (upon Tyne [UK]) based Horrified released their debut about a year and a half ago, and the AMG staff collectively shrugged. A throwback death metal record with some neat riffs and an authentic sound, it lacked in both originality and execution, and was summarily dismissed by yours truly. But wise old man of the AMG staff, Al Kikuras saw something in the band, a certain rough charm and attitude that’s missing in the majority of retro-death.” Al knows retro-death.
