“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.
Slaughterer
El Cuervo and Diabolus in Muzaka’s Top Ten(ish) of 2017
“Making a successful and popular Top Ten list involves a series of complex calculations, comprised of, but not limited to the following: a tallying of recorded scores, estimated scene cred, a precise proportion of big and underground bands, a spot for that one record universally praised during the year, and a pathological need to seem like one has not missed anything.” Making a list, checking it thrice.
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.