Slaughterer

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.

El Cuervo and Diabolus in Muzaka’s Top Ten(ish) of 2017

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)

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.