Lately (3/17/19)

*A review of an awesome four-band death-metal bill, featuring DFSBP faves Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel.

*A write-up of an excellent new oral history of the band King's X, with whom I've become fairly obsessed within the past year or so.

Still I'm sworn: Morbid Angel's 'Covenant' at 25

 Here's my 25th-anniversay tribute to my favorite metal album of all time. Paradoxically, this "41-minute blast of white-hot satanic rage" still fills me with immense joy. I'm not sure I've ever been so instantly frightened, awestruck and captivated by music as when I first heard "Rapture" on Headbanger's Ball back in 1993. (The eerily evocative video by Tony Kunewalder certainly played into that reaction.) This was some kind of new frontier of extremity that I had been searching for without even realizing it. I listened to the album twice through in recent days, and it has lost none of its savage majesty.

As I discuss in the piece, there is one line on the album that could be termed problematic, to say the least. The following is hopefully self-evident, but my praise of the album as an artistic statement should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of the perspective(s) that may have played into its creation. I take away from Covenant what I take away from most heavy music I love: an idea of pushing one's self toward some new threshold of intensity. Speaking strictly in those terms, I still haven't heard much else that can rival it.

Best of 2017: Metal

[Updated 12/26/17: Added Power Trip's Nightmare Logic, which I recently went back to and loved, to the albums list below. Also added a short list of metal-related sites/publications I dig, and a link to the RS 100 Greatest Metal Albums list, at the end.]

Rolling Stone's year-end metal round-up is now live. Happy as always to help put this one together with my colleagues Chris Weingarten and Kory Grow. It was an interesting year for the genre in that there weren't quite as many mainstream/-ish tentpole releases to consider (like, for example, the Metallica album that rightly topped last year's RS metal list), so we were able to make room for a good amount of fringier picks like Oxbow, Pyrrhon and Krallice.

Likewise, my own listening ranged a little farther afield (emphasis on "a little"). Some of my favorite underground bands put out new records this year, including longtime DFSBP faves Suffocation, Immolation and Incantation, but these albums didn't really grab me like I was expecting or hoping. Same goes for the new Cannibal Corpse album, Red Before Black, though it wouldn't surprise me if I have a real moment with this one somewhere down the line, as always seems to happen with their LPs.

This set of circumstances opened up the field a bit, so I spent a good amount of time with Code Orange's Forever, for example, an album that represents a sub-scene I really don't follow closely (I guess I'd call it metalcore, for lack of a better term?). The band's over-the-top machismo often borders on the corny, but their obvious skill as players and writers — and, just as importantly, as overall architects of texture; the album is filled with industrial/ambient interludes that make the whole thing flow together like one long song — wins out. They really take the craft of extremity seriously, and conversely, they seem to think hard about the way their moodier, more dynamic elements only make the punishing climaxes hit that much harder. Speaking of those moody elements, the album's obvious crowning jewel to me was this extraordinary track, a song that nailed a sort of 1994–alt-metal sweet spot for me and rarely left my brain all year:



I certainly wouldn't have minded if all of Forever had sounded like that (if I'm remembering correctly, guitarist Reba Meyers only sings lead on one other song, the awesomely eerie closer "dream2"), but the fact that the track felt like an odd, alluring detour only made it stand out more.

Another album I blurbed for the list, Morbid Angel's Kingdoms Disdained, has been making me giddy since I first heard it a month or so back. We may never know the real backstory of this record, as Morbid Angel mastermind Trey Azagthoth isn't doing anything but goofball email interviews this time around (I tried hard to line up a feature based on a phone or in-person chat, to no avail), but the band's saga over the past few years (an almost universally reviled reunion-ish album that they all but ignored on tour, Azagthoth's subsequent parting of ways with classic-era frontman David Vincent and reunion with mid-period growler/bassist Steve Tucker, etc.) has been the stuff of a death-metal soap opera. Amid all the drama, I'm honestly shocked at how quickly Trey and Steve were able to right the course; in the absence of a return to the band's Vincent-era glory, which, it now seems clear, was never going to happen anyway, Kingdoms is better than any fan could have hoped for, a vicious, efficient and suitably batshit record that might just be stronger than any of the three albums from Tucker's initial tenure in the band. This track in particular is, as far as I'm concerned, a new Morbid classic:



(Check that nasty, writhing waltz riff that starts around :32.)

Moving on to metal's retro-prog, neo-gatefold wing, which seems to be really booming at the moment, thanks to high-profile bands like Mastodon and Pallbearer, Elder's Reflections of a Floating World was the one that really did it for me this year. Mastodon's Emperor of Sand is a very fine record, though a somewhat predictable one, proceeding in orderly fashion from their last couple LPs; in my opinion they still haven't quite figured out how to balance their sprawling-prog inclinations with their streamlined-FM-rock ones in a way that feels really wholesome and fully satisfying. And like their last record, the new Pallbearer LP didn't fully grab me the way I was hoping, considering how much I loved 2012's Sorrow and Extinction, though I admit I need to spend more time with Heartless.

But that Elder record is just pure majesty, total class. It's very rare to hear a fundamentally throwback-ish band whose channeling of various vintage sounds comes across as so natural and ingrained. It's like they've steeped themselves so thoroughly in the song- and riffcraft lessons of the past that they're able to just speak the Tongue of Epic Rock with utter fluency, almost as if these sounds and textures originated with them. Behold:



Speaking of pure majesty and total class, what to say about the no-nonsense creative dynamo that is Krallice, which released two more staggering statements within the past couple months? Doug Moore, a fellow writer and musician (and onetime DFSBP contributor), whose own band Pyrrhon made the RS list with the excellent What Passes for Survival, a mind-shreddingly intense and complex album that I feel like I'm just beginning to get some kind of firm grasp on after a few pleasurably bewildered listens, recently summed up Krallice's singular position in the metal underground in this sharp essay for the November edition of Stereogum's "Black Market" metal round-up. And it's a singularity that deserves to be celebrated, that of a group operating in essentially, to use Doug's phrase, "hobby band" fashion but producing such a great volume of rich, high-quality work that they put most "career" metal bands to shame.

Krallice's albums are, simply, oceans of content. I have become such an ardent fan that when they put out something new, it typically prompts me to trawl back through their entire, now pretty sizable catalog so that I can properly place the latest release in context. (I did this when Loüm, the first of their 2017 albums came out, and even kept a list of my favorite "holy fuck" moments from throughout the discography, of which there are many.) There is simply a grandness of scale to their music, coupled with a resolutely unbounded aesthetic, that I find deeply inspiring. They frankly make the idea of metal subgenres (and even the now-familiar "extreme" tag) seem deeply idiotic. It's clear from these two new albums, specifically Go Be Forgotten — at the moment I'm ever-so-slightly more in awe of this one, with its mystical, trancelike, often synth-bathed aura, than the gruff, frenzied, dauntingly technical Loüm, which features Neurosis member Dave Edwardson, though I stress that both are towering works that might take years to process — that they're simply making visionary art, period, with the style (and maybe even the very medium) being essentially incidental. In an attention-starved world, these exquisitely detailed, marvelously transporting sounds are a blessing to get lost in, and I can't wait for the next dispatch.



("Ground Prayer" is a phenomenal track, but make sure to hear it at some point in its proper album context, coming after the lengthy ambient piece "Quadripartite Mirror Realm.)

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, in aesthetic but not quality, is Unsane's Sterilize, which, like pretty much all their records, is a lean, brutally efficient smack upside the head. As discussed recently on DFSBP, I simply cannot stop playing this thing, along with Wreck, Visqueen, Occupational Hazard and the rest.



Though I didn't have quite as much of a prolonged moment with Obituary's self-titled LP, pretty much the same principles apply: This veteran band does one thing extremely well and their late-career, "cavemen of metal" cruise-control stage, which I wrote about for Rolling Stone, is a joy to behold in either its live or studio manifestations.



Other 2017 metal (and related styles) I liked a lot, had a moment with, etc.:

Oxbow, Thin Black Duke 
Luxurious and unsettling. Haven't even begun to reckon with this band's decades-long legacy, but this one (and the live show I saw) really pulled me in.

Converge, The Dusk in UsEven having really dug Converge's prior LP, All We Love We Leave Behind, as with Oxbow, I still feel like an outsider with these guys because I'm a late convert: That legendary early stuff (Jane Doe, etc.) just isn't in my blood the way I know it is with many people. But I find their recent output, this new record very much included, remarkable in its poise, power and effortless variety. Kory Grow's write-up for the RS list really nailed it.

Mutoid Man, War Moans 

A party-time spazz-prog-thrash blast. Lead track "Melt Your Mind" is an absolute stunner and one of
my favorite metal tracks of the year.

Memoriam, For the Fallen

Rumbling, elegiac U.K. death metal from former Bolt Thrower frontman Karl Willetts, who helped invent that style, and friends.

Loincloth, Psalm of the Morbid Whore

A second, and sadly final, full-length helping of obsessive math-doom wizardry from an American underground treasure. (Can't wait to hear what's next for longtime DFSBP favorite Steve Shelton, also of Confessor.)

Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive

Honestly, this one got more play time from me than the original ever did. I love being able to hear these gnarled and creepy epics in something resembling higher fidelity. Read Kory Grow's essential feature on the band and the album. (Note: This one came out very late in 2016, but what can you do.)

The Lurking Fear, Out of the Voiceless GraveSort of like the Memoriam of Sweden: proudly regionally flavored death metal (in this case, cold, nasty, unrelenting) from At the Gates' Tomas Lindberg and other dudes who have been around the block.

Husbandry, Bad Weeds Never Die I wrote the bio for this one, FYI — you can read that on the Aqualamb website — but I was already a huge fan. This band sounds like no one else in NYC right now and I hugely admire their unabashed ambition to write badass, fearlessly eclectic post-hardcore that's as catchy as it is jarring.

Couch Slut, Contempt

Friends of mine and another one of the best bands in town. Seething, explosive and sicker than just about any other music on the planet right now.

Quicksand, Interiors

This is a strange one. One of the most treasured bands of my youth finally returns (sans their vital lead guitarist Tom Capone, who ran into some personal issues that kept him from participating), with mixed results. I admire how Walter Schreifels, Sergio Vega and Alan Cage pushed their sound into newly reflective areas here, but I admit that this record's sometimes sleepy, downbeat, almost post-Radiohead-ish vibe — in light of the taut fury of their classic work — left me a little stumped. Still, I'm glad it exists and I'm curious to see if it'll bloom a little more over time. (Wrote a few words on this one for a November new-release round-up at RS.com.)

Power Trip, Nightmare Logic
I may have snobbishly underattended to this one in light of all the praise it got, which I fully admit is just plain stupid. As you may have heard, this record completely smokes. An unabashedly unoriginal sound — thrash meets hardcore in the 1980s; retro to the point that its almost cosplay— done extremely well. Gorgeously full, crisp, monolithic throwback production and killer songs, especially "Executioner's Tax (Swing of the Axe)." Rock!

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Shout-out to some outlets and writers that keep me inspired and informed:

Last Rites
Stereogum's Black Market
Revolver
Decibel
Metal Bandcamp
Invisible Oranges 
Andy O'Connor
Kim Kelly
Adrien Begrand
Burning Ambulance 
Ian Christe

Lastly:

So glad I got to work with Kory Grow and various other folks on this dream project. And that I finally got to see Iron fucking Maiden live.

Aiming for forever: Krisiun's steady climb to greatness in the face of Metal Myopia

Note: The following post is presented with gratitude to the great Bill Ward, who included Krisiun's Southern Storm among his top 10 metal albums of all time, in a list that he assembled for RollingStone.com and later discussed with me in detail — see also this interview drawn from the same conversation, dealing with his current perspective on the Black Sabbath Siatution — thus inspiring me to really delve into this band's work for the first time.

What does a fan of death metal want? After following and living with this style of music for roughly 25 years, I'm starting to realize that there's no good answer to this question. Or at least no all-purpose one. It would seem that so-called extreme metal draws much, if not all, of its strength from its passionate, opinionated fan base — the ones who come to the gigs, buy the records (or at least illegally download them and argue about them on message boards) and T-shirts, and generally wave the flag for their favorite bands in quasi-patriotic fashion. In a resolutely anti-pop, or, one could even say, extra-pop (as in, outside of...), medium, your relationship with your public is really your only currency.

But to circle back, what does that public want? I can only really speak for myself. I'll do so here using my latest death-metal obsession, the long-running Brazilian band Krisiun, as an example. During the past couple weeks, I've worked my way through pretty much their entire discography, and what's been most rewarding about this listening project is charting the band's steady march to what I view as greatness. By this I mean, more specifically, hearing how over the course of 10 albums and around 27 years, they've grown into their own skin, gradually locating what their unique contribution to the rich tradition of death metal might be, and then honing and perfecting that, while — and this part is key — also learning to gaze outward, backward and beyond, as they transcend petty and ultimately arbitrary notions of so-called underground authenticity, enriching, strengthening and clarifying their sound with the goal of making a lasting impact on the larger culture of heavy metal.

Metalheads love to draw lines in the sand, barriers of supposed legitimacy: "Metallica are dead to me after the first four albums," "I only listen to the demos," that sort of thing. (Call it Metal Myopia.) In death metal, the idea behind this logic, as I understand it, is that you want only the purest state of primitivism, the work that stems out of somehow not knowing any better. In Krisiun's case, their first full-length, 1995's Black Force Domain is a good example of this:



I get it, of course. There's something deeply appealing about the way this music smothers the rational mind, storming out of the speakers like some unholy tornado. (I'm a huge fan of Revenge, for example, a band that lives for pure sonic filth, or as I put it here "barf music.")

But in all honesty, there's also something boring about it. Of the 10 Krisiun albums I've listened to recently, Black Force Domain and its 1998 follow-up, Apocalyptic Revelation, were the only ones that felt like a chore to sit through. These records felt like onslaughts to be endured rather than music to be enjoyed. And again, believe me, I get it, the idea that metal is, on some deep level, masochistic. But at a certain point, I tend to want music to go somewhere, to reveal a sense of form, a reason for being. (Not too surprising that the die-hards don't seem to agree; poke around the message boards and you'll find plenty of "It's all downhill after Black Force Domain" proclamations regarding Krisiun's body of work.)

After Apocalyptic Revelation, the band got down to the sometimes controversial business (in death metal, at least) of evolving. On 2000's Conquerors of Armageddon, the feral energy of the early stuff is still there, but the music is starting to take some kind of shape, make some kind of sense. The rabid energy is still there, but you can tell here that the band — made up of brothers Alex Camargo on bass and vocals, guitarist Moyses Kolesne and drummer Max Kolesne — is starting to pay attention to dynamics, to structure, to precision, to the craft of their musical violence.

Ageless Venomous, from '01, goes even further in this direction. It's also an album that sums up a lot of the issues — the word "problems" might be more apt, but I'm being diplomatic — with death metal production from, say, the mid-to-late '90s through the early 2000s. (Death-metal production problems still persist, of course, but what I like to call the Pro Tools Nightmare, that insanely artificial-sounding approach illustrated by recent Immolation and, especially, Suffocation albums, didn't really seem to come into full flower until the 2010s.) Fascinatingly, this band that once wholeheartedly embraced a primitivist sonic dust cloud decided here that they were ready to be fully and completely heard. (Max Kolesne on Ageless Venemous: "It sounds clearer, it shows how precise we can play, there is no blurry parts, everything is there, and that's exactly what we were trying to get.") The album's sound is almost shockingly dry: All sense of sonic space is absent, leaving a weirdly neutered sound that I've actually come to enjoy on multiple listens, largely because of how alien and unconventional it is. The sound only serves to highlight the aesthetic risks the band was taking at this time; see the album's pair of instrumentals: the near-six-minute death-prog workout "Serpents Specters" and dizzying 90-second acoustic track "Diableros," which sounds something like John McLaughlin's Shakti meets Rodrigo y Gabriela.

The band's next album, 2003's Works of Carnage, is, to me, a clear demarcation point in their discography, and the point at which Krisiun really became themselves, so to speak. On songs like "Murderer" and "Wolfen Tyranny," you can hear them embracing this sort viciously precise staccato riffing style that would become one hallmark of their mature style.



As opposed to the undifferentiated, everything-in-the-red approach of the early work, here the band is expertly controlling the interplay of stabbing attack and cold silence. A song like this almost strikes me as the death-metal equivalent of Helmet, in the sense that the sonic blank spaces the band builds in only make the violence of the riffs themselves that much more pronounced. (Venerable metal writer, and my former Invisible Oranges editor, Cosmo Lee was all over this principle in his beautifully written Pitchfork review of Krisiun's 2008 LP, Southern Storm, as solid a summation of the band's appeal as you'll read: "Now their signature is precise machine-gun riffs punctuated by short pauses," he writes. He's also dead-on re: Max's parts sounding like "drum rudiments on steroids." It's noteworthy that Cosmo was all over the online metal beat — and paying close attention to worthy yet wholly unfashionable bands such as Krisiun, to boot — well before the current metal blogosphere took shape.)

You can hear how by this time, the band has essentially thrown out the stock death-metal playbook — the blastbeat is still there, but it's been obsessively chiseled, manipulated, honed. Instead of just surrendering to primal, blasphemous energy, the Krisiun of 2003 is making choices. They're making their music work for them rather than the other way around, and in the process taking steps toward becoming a band that's busy carving out a distinctive and substantial legacy, rather than one that embodies some fetishized idea of primitivism. (Reflecting more on Metal Myopia, I think it's a mindset that values underground cachet at the expense of actual, honest-to-God greatness; witness the common overuse of words like "legendary" in reference to bands who broke up before they even so much as recorded an album, went on tour or, you know, made music worth listening to.)

The upswing continues on the next three Krisiun releases: 2004's Bloodshed (an EP's worth of new songs plus a handful of tracks from the band's 1993 EP Unmerciful Order), 2006's AssassiNation and 2008's Southern Storm. I'm still getting to know these records, but they've nevertheless become instant death-metal core canon for me. Especially by the time of Southern Storm, the band just sounds so in control of its volatile materials, weaving the furious blasting that lies at the heart of its sound into gripping, epic songs. Here's Krisiun playing the opening track of that record, "Slaying Steel," on a Brazilian TV show in 2015 (I highly recommend checking out both full episodes of this show Estúdio Showlivre that the band has appeared on, from 2013 and 2015; incredible to see full-length death-metal performances being documented in-studio like this):



Krisiun may have reached their intensity threshold on Southern Storm, but they still had plenty of growing to do. It's tough for me to pick a favorite record of theirs, but if pressed, I'd go with their next LP, 2011's The Great Execution — a frankly stunning album and one that makes me wonder where the hell my head was at that year when I could have been savoring this upon its release. (I certainly knew of Krisiun and had heard bits and pieces of their work over the years, but this recent listening jag represents my first real dive into their catalog.)

To my ears, this is the album where Krisiun really graduated into the realm of the death-metal elite, populated by some of their key influences such as Morbid Angel and Deicide. Before, they were masters of speed, intensity, tightness. Here, they focus more on dynamics and variety — without losing an ounce of their patented ferocity — and the results are magical, one of those death-metal albums where the subgenre tag seems entirely superfluous. Think of a record like Morbid Angel's Domination or Death's Symbolic, albums that bear obvious "extreme" trappings but that present their ideas in such clear, accessible fashion that any metalhead with open ears can easily hear the brilliance on display.


Songs like "Blood of Lions" and "The Extremist" feature blast sections as fierce as the ones on unremitting speedfests like Conquerors of Armageddon, but here they're framed by tasteful set-ups and ass-kicking breakdowns, and topped with catchy-as-fuck choruses. You can hear Krisiun reveling in the fist-pumping power of metal that really and truly rocks. Songs like "Descending Abomination" place half-time riffs front and center, and the results recall the best of Morbid Angel's slower moments circa Domination, or the groovier bits of Sepultura's Chaos A.D — like The Great Execution, albums that marry the fury of the underground with the crowd-savvy accessibility of more mainstream acts. (The fact that Execution is the best-produced album of Krisiun's career to date — big ups to Andy Classen — doesn't hurt one bit.)

As you can see from this 2004 Moyses Kolesne quote — emphasis mine — from the Works of Carnage period, the band had been thinking along these lines for a while:

You gain maturity after touring a lot. We've learned so much. We play so much better now. We've played for such huge crowds. We've seen how people react; we've seen how the dynamics of the groove works. We've learned to work more into the groove, into the dynamics of the music itself. We used to only go for the fast wild stuff all the time. Works of Carnage is easier to understand, its easier to get into. I think the other albums were a lot of chaos. We're still chaotic but there's more of a groove and we tried to achieve a heavier production. It's really straightforward, not so many riffs. The musical structure is simpler. I don't know how to describe this. I just know that we've grown up a lot.

More on that theme from Moyses in 2012, following the release of The Great Execution:

When you’re young, you just want to go really extreme, y’know? You don’t really care about your roots; you just want to play as aggressive and fast as possible, because that’s the driving feeling you have inside. But once you start getting older, you feel that if you just keep doing it the same, things can get a bit boring. So instead of just taking influences from the trends in music nowadays, we decided to look to the past, to stuff we grew up with, like the old Maiden, old Black Sabbath, old Metallica, old Sepultura stuff, and put it in our music. It came out really satisfying, I think.

This kind of thinking — in fact, the act of thinking at all — these ideas of progression, development, refinement, audience-consciousness, communion with your musical predecessors, etc., are anathema to the rhetoric of the underground, to the Metal Myopic concept of remaining "true," i.e., stunted and essentially amateurish, at all costs. This exchange, from a 2014 Alex Camargo interview with MetalUnderground.com, is telling in that regard:

MU.com: …when someone hears the term “death metal,” they tend to think of one thing. So the challenge is to turn death metal into something bigger than that one thing.
You got it, man. If you make it your career… I mean, we’re here forever. I’ve got nowhere to go! [Laughs] We have to try to expand it, make it bigger, no matter if people give a shit or not. But we have to try. If people like it, that’s killer. Death metal isn’t as popular as melodic heavy metal, so it definitely is a challenge to stick around while playing fast and hard. We do it because we love it; otherwise we’d sell out or just stop doing what we’re doing. We wanna keep doing it, man. We wanna keep having a good time, keep feeling good. That’s what it’s about; as long as we’re motivated to do it, we’re good to go.

There you have it. The progression is about feeding the music, helping it grow and, God forbid, reach new ears. These guys are lifers — professionals, moreover — and unlike the many extreme-metal musicians for whom music is not a full-time gig — including members of relatively big-name bands like Immolation and Suffocation — they don't have the luxury of being content with the status of back-patch/message-board legends. Krisiun will likely never be as big as an Iron Maiden, a Mastodon or even a Cannibal Corpse, but that doesn't mean they're going to build some kind of aesthetic ceiling into the music itself. The Great Execution is the sound of a band saying, "We can retain everything we were before and be so much more at the same time."

Krisiun set an exceedingly high bar there, one that, to my ears, they didn't quite meet on their most recent LP, 2015's Forged in Fury. My current impression of this one is that it's a very good album that lacks the breathtaking command and confidence of The Great Execution. You can hear the band trying out still more new ideas — Forged is definitely the proggiest Krisiun album to date, in the sense of unexpected time signatures, varied dynamics and intricate arrangements — but while on Execution, their fresher elements sounded seamlessly integrated with their old, unrepentantly extreme ethos, on Forged, a bit of awkwardness creeps in, especially when it comes to Camargo's vocal delivery. On earlier albums, he had always sounded rivetingly intense and wholly unfazed; here, there are times when he sounds like he's struggling to fit his trademark gruff roars over the songs' rhythmically thorny arrangements. Forged isn't a bad record by any means — great riffs still abound, for one thing — but it's one that strikes me as more of a transitional statement; accordingly, I have high hopes for whatever Krisiun does next.

It's likely that the message-board police won't be listening either way. I found this section from the 2012 Moyses interview to be an extremely apt, wryly funny illustration of the "plight" of a band like Krisiun — one that at this point in their career is neither a critical darling (probably because their work exists completely apart from the style of death metal that's currently in vogue, one that privileges arty, in some cases pointlessly or inconsequentially so, weirdness over intelligible, effective songcraft and traditional — or to put it another way, Wacken-friendly — heavy-metal values) or a favorite of the wearisomely orthodox underground-til'-death die-hards.

A couple people have said, “What, are you guys wimping out, or something?” And “The record’s not a hundred percent fast,” and shit like that. Kids, man. They need to bitch about anything. And some critics back in time have said, “Oh, Krisiun’s so boring, they just play the same shit,” and we put the new record out and some say, “Now I can listen to them.” So nobody has the same opinion, but we’re gonna feed some hungry kids that like extreme metal, like me when I was a kid. I just liked blasting stuff back then. I mean, I always liked all kinds of metal, but I REALLY liked the blasting shit. So I know there are kids out there that like that stuff, and we’re there for them. And if a critic just listens to “soft” metal, sure, he ain’t gonna have any clue about us. We play for us, for metal – not for critics. So if you like the music, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t, but you don’t need to be out there spreading bad news about bands.

The funny thing is that the Metal Myopic "kids" he's referring to are really, at this point, often just tediously close-minded adults. But the point is well-taken. The metal scene is at once an oasis of support and positivity and passionate engagement and a cesspool of stunted, dismissive thinking. To any clear-eyed, open-eared observer, a band like Krisiun is as "true" as they come: three musicians deeply invested in underground values (that adolescent part of one's self that "REALLY liked the blasting shit") but also thoughtful enough to leave room for growth, for progression, for the no-shortcuts-allowed cultivation of a long-term aesthetic arc, the kind that marks the careers of all the true, deserving legends — the Metallicas, the Maidens, the Mastodons.

Krisiun is a band that's daring to aim for greatness, for a spot in the pantheon, not in that lower tier of cult favorites but in the realms of the etched-in-the-stars elite (as Moyses puts it, "...whatever comes or doesn't come for us, the music stays here forever"). Following high points like Southern Storm and The Great Execution, they're still on the upward ascent, and you can bet they'll be climbing as long as they can.

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*Another awesome artifact from Brazilian TV: a near hour-long 2015 sitdown with all three brothers in which they tell the complete story of the band.

*Alex's perspective on Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus, an album that was of course burned in effigy by the message-board police (and, let's be fair, most everyone else) upon its release, is refreshing and apt, given M.A.'s status as a band that's long been subjected to "They're dead to me after X album" treatment by the underground peanut gallery: "It took me some time to get it and understand the point, but I got it, man."

*Max on the awesome drum-centric "video podcast" drumtalk.

Rolling up their sleeves: Suffocation and the pleasures of death-metal conservatism

One of the chief constants throughout my listening life has been death metal. I first got into the style in roughly 1993, via Morbid Angel, whose masterpiece, Covenant, turns 20 in a few months. For a long time, I maintained a sort of mental hierarchy re: death metal as a whole, which went something like: "There's Morbid, and then there's everyone else." While I still adore that band, and worship their inspired, wildly erratic take on the subgenre, my perspective on death metal has changed a lot throughout the past two decades. These days, I seem to be more interested in consistency and longevity, a kind of dogged devotion to craft, than anything else. Bands that once seemed workmanlike now appear remarkable. Several times over the past few years, I've found myself off on one of my extreme listening jags, so immersed in, enamored of and acclimated to the work of a single death-metal band that I can barely stand to hear a note of anything else. In late 2011, it was all about first Obituary, then Immolation; last summer, it was Cannibal Corpse; currently, it's Suffocation.

I'm pretty sure I first heard this band on the 1993 Roadrunner comp At Death's Door II, a landmark purchase for me at the time, the album that introduced me to staples of my extreme-metal listening diet both then (Disincarnate, Fear Factory) and more recently (Cynic, Gorguts). I'm pretty sure, as well, that the Suffocation track in question ("Prelude to Repulsion," from their 1993 sophomore LP, Breeding the Spawn) didn't make much of an impression. It's only in recent years that I've developed an obsession with Suffocation. Blood Oath, from 2009, piqued my interest in a major way, but it's the brand-new Pinnacle of Bedlam that's really sent me over the top.

The MetalSucks review of this album is dead-on and highly recommended. I can definitely relate to the initial skepticism that Sammy O'Hagar cops to in that write-up. For those not up to speed, here's the gist: There's been a bit of drama/upheaval in the Suffocation camp over the past year or so. Drummer Mike Smith, a staple of the Long Island band's lineup since their 1990 demo (and a musician whom Heavy Metal Be-Bop readers might remember from the Damión Reid installment), left the band on bad terms last year. Then, the news dropped that vocalist Frank Mullen, a charter member and one of death metal's most charismatic frontmen, would no longer be a permanent part of the band's touring incarnation. (Suffocation played with a fill-in growler at last summer's Obscene Extreme fest.)

That Pinnacle of Bedlam is extraordinarily good—one of the finest LPs, and maybe even the finest LP, that Suffocation has released—tells you something about the way this band operates, and tangentially about the M.O. shared by the truly great veteran death metal acts, including the aforementioned Immolation, Cannibal Corpse and Obituary. With help from Spotify, I've been binging on the Suffocation discography over the past week or so—seven full-lengths (including Pinnacle) and two EPs—and what really stands out is the steadiness, the determination with which this band has progressed. As with, say, Immolation, you won't find any wild departures in the Suffocation discography; you'll find a band laying out a primitive yet competent blueprint on its early releases—compare these two bands' seminal releases, Dawn of Possession and Human Waste, respectively, which came out within a few months of one another in 1991—and slowly but surely honing that into something truly fearsome, absolutely airtight. There are no accidents in the Suffocation discography, just a gradual perfection of a craft, namely death metal marked by fiendishly complex yet ever-headbangable riffage, assaultively growl-barked vocals and the juxtaposition of jackhammer blastbeats and churning, mosh-commanding breakdowns. It's a style so iconic that if one is showing up late to the Suffocation party, as I did, it can be easy to mistake them for a generic death-metal band. In reality, they wrote much of the blueprint for a certain subcategory of the genre and have proceeded to cling to that blueprint like Super Glue. Pinnacle of Bedlam is, then, simply their latest, greatest dispatch. There's no real need to play-by-play it (though, for those that might be concerned, I will specify that Smith's replacement, Dave Culross, absolutely smokes here); it's an effing Suffocation record, and it's worthy of their legacy, which is saying a ton. Overall, it feels a bit speedier, more technical, more straight-up overwhelming than its predecessor, Blood Oath, for those keeping track. From a more general perspective, though, this is the key takeaway: If you enjoy Suffocation as much as I do, Pinnacle of Bedlam will make you ridiculously happy, as it has me.

I mentioned Morbid Angel above, and they're relevant to this discussion mainly as a counterexample. In 1989's Altars of Madness, they released one of death metal's indisputable early benchmarks. The next two records saw the band straining against the style's essential underground-ness, seeing how far they could push the, for lack of a better term, professionalism of the style, and in the process, arriving at what I consider to be the single greatest death-metal album of all time (not to mention my favorite metal album, full stop): 1993's Covenant. But as anyone who read their interviews around that time could tell you, Morbid Angel was never content to be just a death metal band. They spoke with arrogant indifference re: "the scene," and in a way, they had earned the right to. Band mastermind Trey Azagthoth was, and as far as I'm concerned, still is, one of the great oddball visionaries of contemporary rock-based artistry, a guy who has seemed to draw more inspiration over the years from video games and motivational speakers than he has from other music, let alone from a narrowly defined subgenre such as death metal. It's that kind of outside-the-box thinking that makes possible a masterpiece like Covenant—and its flawed but still excellent follow-up, 1995's Domination—but that also breeds a kind of precarious eclecticism. Longtime DFSBP readers might recall me tying myself in knots trying to defend Morbid Angel's widely reviled, industrial-leaning 2011 comeback LP. As with any gonzo departure of that nature, the true test of its value is whether or not the record's allure outlasts the controversy that it incites, and the truth of the matter is that, for me, the record in question (Illud Divinum Insanus) has not measured up in that regard. After my initial flurry of probably meta-contrarian interest—i.e., born more out of hating on the haters than out of my own genuine positive feeling toward what I was hearing—I haven't felt the desire to spin the thing a single time.

I've meandered way off course here, but I promise there's a Suffocation-related point mixed in with all this. And that point is this: There is no Covenant in the Suffocation discography—no genre-transcending ultra-masterpiece—but by the same token, there is also no Illud Divinum Insanus—no pointlessly baffling head-scratcher. As with the Immolation catalog, what you get listening to the Suffocation oeuvre front-to-back is a respectable but not-quite-there early phase followed by an unbroken string of staggering rippers. In other words, once these bands have found their respective zones, they've stayed right dead in the center of them, making small tweaks but not seeming to feel any great need to change up the formula, to attempt experiments or departures—hence what I said above re: workmanlike-ness, a certain humble craftsmanship that, in my listening experience anyway, seems to thrive as strongly in death metal as it does anywhere else in contemporary music. (To my ears, Suffocation really hit its stride, which persists to this day, on its third LP, 1995's Pierced from Within; my recall of the Immolation catalog isn't super-fresh at the moment, but I seem to remember that their own third LP, 1999's Failures for Gods, marked the beginning of their all-killer phase.)

Sure, there's deviation within the Suffocation catalog from 1995 until now. Some of that has to do with personnel. Much like Cannibal Corpse, Suffocation has shuffled members frequently over a 25-year existence. Among the current lineup, Mullen is the only consistent original member, with guitarist Terrance Hobbs coming in a close second; as far as I know, only these two have appeared on every Suffocation release. Guitarist Guy Marchais apparently cofounded the band, but he had departed by the time of the demo and wouldn't record with them until 2004's Souls to Deny (an LP that marked the band's return after a five-year hiatus); Smith, meanwhile, didn't play on Pierced from Within or the next Suffocation release, ’98's Despise the Sun EP. All this is inside baseball, though. For the non–nerdily obsessive, the point is that Suffocation has maintained a certain monolithic quality level for the better part of the past two decades. To these ears, the Cannibal Corpse discography has been spottier—I'd maintain that they peaked on 1994's The Bleeding and then again with 2006's Kill, and haven't looked back—but the principle is the same: In a sense these bands are tried-and-true brands as much as they are artistic entities. Personnel changes; production styles change (you can especially hear that in the Suffocation discography; spin Pierced from Within alongside Suffocation's absolutely massive-sounding self-titled 2006 record for a quick lesson in how drastically the recorded presentation of extreme metal has shifted over time). But the core aesthetic is unwavering. Fans of bands like Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse and Immolation don't need to worry about their heroes fancying a surprise, an experiment, a departure. Sure, you'll get the odd quasi-curveball: an instrumental track from Cannibal, the occasional clean-toned guitar passage / whispered-not-growled vocal from Immolation, a ballad-like intro from Suffocation (e.g., on the mindblowingly good "Sullen Days" from Pinnacle of Bedlam). But what you won't get is the album-length WTF moment.

On paper, this might seem tedious, but in practice, speaking from a fan's perspective, it's actually pretty damn delightful. You know these bands are going to slay, both on record and onstage. (I haven't caught Immolation yet—can't wait for this in June—though I can vouch for the live awesomeness of both Cannibal Corpse and Suffocation, the latter of whom I saw at Maryland Deathfest last year.) In that sense, they're critic-proof. An outsider might roll their eyes at yet another Cannibal Corpse, Immolation or Suffocation record, but as long as these bands are recording, there will never come a time when the die-hards will not rabidly swarm one of these releases, record-industry downfall be damned. It seems like a silly stat to point out, but I couldn't help but be impressed by the whopping 56 Amazon reviews, most of them raves, for Suffocation's Souls to Deny. What that number tells you is that there is a real audience for this stuff, that fans appreciate consistency, that so-called artistic evolution can sometimes be overrated. Sometimes, you just want a band that delivers. There's something touching about this sort of closed-circuit artist-audience relationship. I'm sure it exists in other subgenres too—perhaps in the jam-band scene, another sphere regarded by "the outside world" with indifference or outright scorn, but one that enjoys serious, unwavering fan support.

It's this relationship, upheld year-in, year-out—and in the case of veteran bands like Suffocation, decade-in, decade-out—that keeps me coming back to death metal, 20 years after I first discovered it. The kind of longevity these bands embody isn't an empty one; it isn't mere "hanging around." Sure, just like any other genre, death metal has its wild aberrances—those acts like, say, Gorguts or Death, who successfully attempt some insanely ambitious stylistic makeover, as well as your Morbid Angels, who clip the hurdle as they're attempting to leap over it—much as it has its sticks-in-the-mud. I won't name names, but I can think of a handful of death-metal bands who have been around just about as long as Suffocation and who don't interest me in the slightest. Yes, Suffocation may be reading from a recipe at this point, but the recipe yields something absolutely delicious—it's no longer novel, but nor, if you have a taste for it, does it ever really get old. Death metal may not embody the media-friendly sexiness of black metal—the latter's often tedious trappings of supposed real-life anguish, its absurd/enthralling pageantry, its deliberately taxing lo-fi-ness/experimentalism; as is probably clear, I've never really warmed up to that subgenre. But what death metal offers, at its best, is the rolling up of sleeves. Vein-popping virtuosity applied to pure baroque artistry. Hyper-ambitiousness within a formally conservative framework. Craft. Sweat. Head-down devotion. It makes me so happy.

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Here's a quick Suffocation sampler, touching on all five albums from the new Pinnacle of Bedlam back through 1995's Pierced from Within. If you like what you hear, I recommend giving each of these records a good, concerted listen. Effigy of the Forgotten and Breeding the Spawn—from ’91 and ’93, respectively—have their primitive charms as well. (Interestingly, the band has made a habit of re-recording tracks from the subpar-sounding Breeding throughout their later career, a practice that seems to tie into my impression of them as perfectionist craftsmen; Pinnacle concludes with one of these: "Beginning of Sorrow.")

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P.S. Here's a great new interview with Terrance Hobbs, via Phil Freeman at Burning Ambulance.

Baroque riff serration: In praise of late Cannibal Corpse

 In 2001, Gary Giddins wrote:

"Let's be bold: The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today. I realize that I will almost certainly hear another quartet, or trio or quintet or octet, this week or next, that will make me want to backpedal. But every time I see Ware's group or return to the records, it flushes the competition from memory."

I loved this proclamation when I first read it—the definitiveness of it, the employment of critical license (whatever that might be) to say, "This thing that I think simply is so." Over the past week or so, I've been feeling like making a similar statement re: the realm of metal (specifically death metal, though I'm comfortable with the "extreme" qualifier):

Cannibal Corpse is the best band in extreme metal today.

Some of my greatest musical pleasures over the past few years have involved reengaging with bands I'd previously thought I'd apprehended entirely and moved on from. (One biggie would be Obituary; I also recently awakened to the glories of Immolation, though in the latter case, I was starting from scratch.) Cannibal Corpse definitely falls into that category. Growing up as a death-metal fan, I was blinded by my love for Morbid Angel. Around the time of their 1993 masterpiece, Covenant, Morbid had reached peak arrogance. I remember reading interviews with them where they'd dismiss the entire genre of death metal with a sneer, and simply state, in so many words, "We are the best, the only, practitioner of this music that matters." At the time, and for many years afterward, I tended to agree. I listened to a lot of other death metal in the early-to-mid ’90s—Deicide, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, Disincarnate, etc.—but when I wasn't spinning Morbid records (Covenant and Domination, in particular), it was like I was taking a break. I agreed completely with their self-assessment; Morbid's output did in fact sound 1000 times richer and more distinctive to me than all the rest. They had the most memorable songs ("God of Emptiness," "World of Shit," "Nothing But Fear," "Dawn of the Angry," etc.—all still some of my favorite metal tracks, "extreme" or otherwise), the most outlandish personalities (Trey Azagthoth, the death-metal guitarist who dared to thank not only Anthony Robbins but characters from Street Fighter II in his liner notes) and, on Covenant at least, the most brutal, immediate, uncanned production. Other death metal, to me, was really a competent and—since I happened to be an insatiable metalhead at the time—moderately effective fulfillment of a certain set of conventions: blast beats, growling, lyrical and visual garishness, etc.

I should say, though, that Cannibal Corpse's fourth album, 1994's The Bleeding—an album that A) contains songs such as "Fucked With a Knife" and "Stripped, Raped and Strangled" and B) was purchased for me at Streetside Records in Overland Park, KS, by my mother as a reward for attending a Jewish Sunday-school retreat—deserves an honorable mention in that regard. No, it wasn't Covenant, but it was, and still is, an uncommonly varied, well-crafted and enjoyable set of death-metal songs, about three fourths of which I can still sing the riffs from on command ("Staring Through the Eyes of the Dead" features one of the grooviest death-metal riffs you'll ever hear, while the title track boasts a head-smackingly simple yet completely unshakable low-to-high caveman guitar part). I had the three prior Cannibal Corpse albums as well, but they all seemed to pale in comparison to The Bleeding. I didn't spend enough time with the debut, Eaten Back to Life, to develop a real bond with it, and aside from the immortal "Hammer Smashed Face," which, as everyone knows, appears in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 1992's Tomb of the Mutilated and 1991's Butchered at Birth seemed to have little to offer than shock. Simply put, the playing wasn't that good, especially on Tomb; the band just sounded thin and flimsy to me: a rickshaw in comparison with the unstoppable tank that was Morbid Angel. And the production was simply godawful. Really all there was to fixate on was the unspeakable offensiveness of the song titles ("Entrails Ripped from a Virgin's Cunt," e.g.) and the absurdly low cavebeast growl of frontman Chris Barnes.

I now realize that in this era—again, as demonstrated particularly well on The Bleeding—Cannibal Corpse had one of the more impressive guitar tandems in extreme metal: Jack Owen (who later went on to play in Deicide) and Rob Barrett (who rejoined the band in the mid-aughts and still plays with them). But my real loyalty was with Barnes—along with Deicide's Glen Benton, probably my favorite non-Azagthoth death-metal "character" (and that's how I thought of these guys then, like action figures or something, because I never got to see any of these bands like at the time; my exposure to them was entirely through reading Metal Maniacs, Rip and various smaller fanzines). Barnes was/is an affable, pot-loving dude with a terrifying presence/delivery and a sick, sick mind. (I should say here that I really like Undead, the new album by Barnes's still-thriving post-Cannibal band Six Feet Under.) In the latter regard, the Tomb of the Mutilated chapter in Precious Metal is well worth your time.

Anyway, so right about the time I started drifting away from my first phase of die-hard death-metal fandom in favor of what I'll call, for lack of a better term, a wide variety of "indie" music (ranging from craw and Dazzling Killmen to Hoover, Fugazi, June of 44, Karate—whom I just listened to last night and found to be awesome—Slint, Tortoise and what seems like 100 others), Chris Barnes left Cannibal Corpse. I remember hearing Cannibal's first post-Barnes, post-Bleeding release, 1996's Vile, and feeling crestfallen. It seemed to me that just as Morbid Angel did when they first split from classic-era frontman David Vincent (who's been back with the band since the mid-aughts)—read more about my gradually evolving opinion on Morbid's post-Vincent period here—Cannibal Corpse had backpedaled into generic-ness, a state of contentment re: simply executing a subgenre rather than defining or expanding it. I didn't give Vile much of a chance at the time; after all, as described above, I was fixated on other styles, other avenues of underground, rock-based intensity. But all the same, I knew that the time had come to take a break from caring all that much about what the Corpse was up to.

Flash forward a decade, to 2006's Kill. Somehow this record ended up crossing my desk at Time Out New York—"somehow" is probably a bit of a stretch; I probably heard about the album and sought it out for nostalgia's sake—and I remember being straight-up shocked by how tight, aggressive and musically ambitious it was. Kill was still, in its way, a relatively straightforward death-metal statement, but unlike Vile (and again, I'm still basing my statements on that record on my contemporary opinion; I've yet to go back and revisit it, and I really need to), it sounded ferocious, overwhelming, utterly state-of-the-art—even progressive, which is a description I'd never thought I'd use with respect to the Corpse. I suddenly realized that a band I'd condemned to second-rate-ness was nothing of the sort.

I'm still playing catch-up re: their discography between The Bleeding and Kill—four full-lengths, from 1998's Gallery of Suicide to 2004's The Wretched Spawn, all featuring vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, who's still in the band and who at this point has been with them a lot longer than Barnes was—so it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what went down between the Corpse and me. Did I just happen to reawaken to the glories of death metal right around the time that they put out Kill? Or was Kill really a major quantum leap for them? Again, I haven't really spent good enough time with those ’98–’04 releases to answer that accurately—aside from the records themselves, which I've got a date with, the awesome and exhaustive Corpse documentary Centuries of Torment is a good source to consult—but I will venture that Kill was an important chapter marker in the Cannibal Corpse saga. For one, it marked the return of Rob Barrett, who had played on both The Bleeding and Vile, and secondly, it was the band's first collaboration with producer Erik Rutan, best known to many as the guitarist-vocalist-mastermind of Hate Eternal, but best known to me as the auxiliary guitarist in Morbid Angel around 1996 and the composer of some of the strongest, most moving material on Domination.

To bring things up to date, this past March, Cannibal Corpse released Torture, their 12th proper LP and their third in a row with Rutan at the helm; that's the album cover you see at the top of this post. It is an absolutely outstanding record, a leading contender for the best metal album I've heard in 2012. (And, like the previous two, it sounds gloriously crisp, full and alive.) It's had the effect of rendering me completely addicted to this latest Corpse renaissance; for the past week or two, aside from various obligatory, assignment-related (and, I should mention, not remotely unenjoyable!) listening and some choice pop (Gotye! Carly Rae Jepsen!), the only records I've voluntarily subjected my ears to are Torture, Kill and the record that falls between them, 2009's Evisceration Plague. I'm starting to feel that this trilogy (for now, at least; hopefully, the Corpse will continue to release excellent records for years to come) represents the peak of what I value in contemporary death metal. Artists such as the ones I mentioned above, Cannibal Corpse included, defined the genre in the late ’80s/early ’90s, and after that initial burst, the genre seemed to calcify, to cease its rapid evolution (a few freak outcroppings like Death excepted). But hearing these records, I can definitively state that late-stage death metal has become its own beast.

Cannibal Corpse may have a relatively limited sonic domain. In other words, their progression doesn't entail obvious face-lifts such as those you might see in the work of, say, Mastodon—the kind of facelifts, I'm slowly realizing, that may elicit a bunch of Oohs and Aaahs off the bat but that don't really amount to all that much in the end. But on the micro level, since the early ’90s Cannibal Corpse has evolved as impressively as just about any rock band I can think of. Most prominently, their work now has a kind of tech-forward giddiness that it never had in the early ’90s, a delight in acrobatic precision. At the same time, though, the band has retained that essential caveman edge that made classic Corpse jams like "Stripped, Raped" so much fun. And though I still don't think that Fisher is as distinctive or compelling a frontman as Barnes, his sheer power and almost comical relentlessness perfectly fits the steroidal direction the band has taken on Kill and the two subsequent releases.

I mentioned "tech-forward giddiness" above. At the end of the day, my favorite thing about these three Corpse records, and about most metal that's dear to my heart, is the sheer quality and quantity of RIFF. Just about every song on these albums features some kind gonzo stunt riff, repeated enough times and articulated clearly enough that it sticks in your mind's ear like melted chewing gum. These are the kinds of riffs that you hear once, and you're like, "What in the fuck was that?!?" Then you hear them a second time and you're like, "Oh, hell yes." Like many of my favorite rock bands, Cannibal Corpse boasts multiple songwriters; in the current incarnation, all members except for Fisher—Barrett, guitarist Pat O'Brien, bassist Alex Webster and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz—are writing, and there's a sense in which they're trying to outdo each other, to see who can achieve the perfect balance of complexity and catchiness. (And let's not forget variety; Evisceration and Torture feature some colossally heavy slow songs—"Evisceration Plague," "Scourge of Iron"—that perfectly complement the uptempo burners.) Not every track succeeds in both respects, but very few songs on any of these three albums feels anything less than ragingly committed.

Watch a feature-length Corpse vid like Global Evisceration and you'll see that what they really are, in the end, is a fan's band. You'll rarely hear from a group that seems to have a better appreciation of the privilege of making a living playing underground music, and along with that appreciation comes a very high personal standard. In Global Evisceration, you'll hear the band talking about set lists, and how they always make an effort to play at least one song from every one of their albums during their headlining gigs. Their records aren't just obligatory merch items; the band is committed to building a quality catalog, both because that's just what long-running bands ought to be doing and because it makes for killer, jukebox-style live shows.

To go back to the Morbid Angel example: It's been a long, slow process, but in the end, I've had to admit to myself that Morbid's 2011 "comeback" effort isn't ultimately a very good album (nor is it total crap either, though!). A cool diversion, maybe, but it says a lot that the band isn't paying it much mind live; when I saw them at Deathfest last month, they were great, but they did not behave like a band that was terribly proud of their newish album. They played two songs from Illud Divinum Insanus, squashed in the middle of what was essentially a greatest-hits set. Cannibal Corpse, it could be argued, simply doesn't have as many "hits" as Morbid does; they didn't produce a trilogy of early albums as world-beating as Altars of Madness, Blessed Are the Sick and Covenant. But if you were to ask me who was the more vital band today, at this very moment, I would say Cannibal Corpse without hesitation. As you can hear on Torture, Cannibal is a band that is as psyched to be crafting straightforwardly fulfilling death metal as their fans are to consume it. And if they're not evolving in immediately obvious ways, they've taken huge steps when it comes to the details. In terms of not only speed and precision, but also re: sheer exhilaration of riff and the ability to bottle that lightning into fully coherent songs—that latter part being, again, the ultimate criteria by which I judge most metal I listen to—I don't think there's a better active-duty extreme-metal band in existence.

Here are five great tracks from the Torture/Evisceration Plague/Kill trifecta. (I hesitate to say they're my "favorites" because there are very few selections on these records that I don't unequivocally love.) I encourage you to buy these albums, because they really benefit from a proper-fidelity listen.

"Intestinal Crank" (Torture):

Key riff sequence begins at :30; it consists of two 5/4 groupings, each with a straightforwardly pounding beginning and a cool flourish at the end. The first time around, that flourish is just a little squiggle, but the second time (listen specifically at :43), it's grotesquely elongated, a writhing, trilling worm of a pattern. (Also, can't beat that five-beat stomp during the intro, a fave device in late-period Cannibal Corpse.)

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"Beheading and Burning" (Evisceration Plague):

Note esp. the irregularly squealing eel of a 9/4 riff that begins at :32. (There's something about the current Corpse guitar method that always gets me thinking along serpentine lines.) The squealing eel comes back in a mutated form around :59 (this time, the riff's in 10/4, I think) and then spirals out into proggy delirium. Some death metal wants to suffocate you, but this style is all about the quick, exacting slice.

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Make Them Suffer (Kill):

A classic Corpse fist-pumper here, maybe the catchiest track of their late period. So many tasty details in the early part of the song, including the drama-heightening guitar break at :28, but what really gets me is the whole breakdown section, which starts in earnest around 1:25. You get this neck-snapping, almost rappish slam riff, followed by the rapidly jostling 1-2-3-4 "Make them suffer!" repeated accent. That sequence returns again after the 2:00 mark, preceded as before by a weird groaning, squiggling variation (around 2:10). From 2:17, it's just head-kick after head-kick, till you're flattened. 

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Rabid (Torture):

These three albums all have gems buried deep within the tracklists. The chugging, filigree-choked pattern that starts around :15 into "Rabid" (the 11th track out of 12 on Torture) makes me deliriously happy. It just. Keeps. Going. Unspooling into total madness. In these riffs, I hear the kind of friendly competition that inevitably arises in a multi-songwriter band. Each composer is constantly on the hunt for the sickest riff, the one that will send the other members, not to mention the listener, reeling. The section is both completely excessive and impossible to forget.

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Scalding Hail (Evisceration Plague):

Nothing too fancy here; just a textbook late-Corpse slammer. But then you get another ecstatic squigglefest around :25 seconds. I love how this band crams so many wrinkles into such a small amount of musical space, and how each one is so starkly audible. Yes, Cannibal Corpse is a technical band, but you'd never describe them as "tech metal." What they really are is a turbocharged thrash band—in the current issue of Decibel magazine, Alex Webster says something to the effect of "If you don't hear Slayer in Cannibal Corpse, you're not listening hard enough"—forever fixated on ingeniously baroque riff serration. You always know they're going to come back around to these patterns, give you another crack at them, and give them another chance to worm their way into your brain.

Playing the tortoise: 20-plus years of Unsanity

Via Pitchfork, here's my review of the new Unsane album, Wreck.

My current thoughts on Unsane tie into a post I wrote last November on the veteran death-metal band Obituary. I enjoyed both of these groups in high school, but my enthusiasm for each was lukewarm; back then I was looking for something more ambitious, and neither quite fit the bill. Unsane was up against craw, Dazzling Killmen and other purveyors of extreme post-hardcore, while Obituary competed against the mighty Morbid Angel.

It's telling that none of that competition really exists anymore. Craw and Dazzling Killmen have broken up, and while Morbid Angel persists, I feel okay admitting that none of their future releases are likely to affect me as much as Covenant did back in '93. In the Unsane review, I referred to them as the tortoises of the NYC noise-rock scene, and Obituary have played a similar role in the Florida death-metal movement. Each has barely progressed since the early '90s; instead they've both chosen to simply dig in and micro-refine over a steady stream of albums.

This is the kind of achievement that's easy to overlook. (It's also the kind of achievement that's not always praiseworthy: A "tortoise" band only seems continually respectable if their current work feels as true and from-the-gut as their vintage material.) What I've realized recently is that, for me, unchanging-ness is no longer a knock in and of itself. And Unsane has certainly endured its share of knocks on just that count; Pitchfork's reviews of its previous two records, Visqueen and Blood Run, were not kind. If I feel that a band continues to mean what they're doing over time, and if what they're doing sounds good to me, I'm completely okay with that essentially anti-evolutionary approach. This flies in the face of that whole "Better to burn out than it is to rust" concept. There's a third alternative there: Keep driving the same car, but make sure it stays polished. I'm not an expert on, say, Motörhead, but I think they've followed the same principle.

What I'm saying in short is that I still believe Unsane. They don't surprise me, but I like the feeling they give me. The dire-ness does not feel forced. Not every band has to "progress." Sometimes progression really means diffusion. Take, say, Mastodon. I enjoy their latest record just fine, but it doesn't have that "Holy shit…" quality. It feels almost casual, in comparison with a back catalog (Remission, e.g.) that at its best has felt deadly serious. That's the risk of evolving, I guess. (And it's worth keeping in mind that records are not always these sacred texts, removed from reality; sometimes they're just a collection of songs to play live. Another thing Unsane and Obituary have in common is that they're both hard-touring bands who continue to kick ass live precisely because they don't mess with the formula onstage or in the studio.)

For me, the real takeaway is that there's no one right way to play it. Longevity is the first priority, and if a band can hang around and still make vital, enjoyable records 20-odd years after it started, I have no problem with the fact that those records sound pretty much exactly the same in the macro sense. (Nor, I should make clear, do I have a problem with progression and evolution; the trick, though, is how to accomplish that without forsaking intensity and conviction.) I've listened to the entire Unsane discography over the past week or so, and while I was barely surprised at all, I rocked out pretty much nonstop. Now, later in life, that means more to me than it did. I don't think it's that my aesthetic palate has dulled; I think it's that I appreciate the raw craftsmanship of rock more. Pick a style and churn it out. That's good enough for me.

P.S. For more on these themes, see last December's Immolation post.

2011 death-metal top 5 (so far)

A confession: I've spent more time defending Illud Divinum Insanus, the new Morbid Angel album that came out last month and was immediately met with a storm of contempt, than actually listening to it. I was so busy elucidating why I felt it wasn't the piece of crap so many others pegged it to be that I glossed over the fact that it might not be such a durable statement. Is it crap? Absolutely not. Is it a great Morbid Angel album? Let's just say that I'm not sure it will stand the test of time the way Covenant or even Heretic has.

I've read a lot of reviews that take an "ignore Illud and try THIS instead" stance, pointing to some "truer" recent representative of the death-metal ideal (Nader Sadek's In the Flesh, e.g., which features ex-Morbid frontman Steve Tucker). That seems dubious to me. I kind of feel like it's important to deal with the record at hand and not judge it against some broad, nebulous convention.

All the same, it's hard to ignore the fact that 2011 has been an outstanding year for meat-and-potatoes death metal, and as much as I hate to admit it, Illud Divinum Insanus is not one of the main reasons why. With all due respect to Morbid Angel, here are five of my 2011 death-metal favorites, all of which will be in the running come year-end-list time.

Deceased
Surreal Overdose (Patac)

This Virgina band has a long and illustrious history in the metal underground, a history I knew pretty much nothing about. I've heard their name for years, and I've always been sort of tickled by the name of drummer/bandleader KING FOWLEY when I've come across it in metal mags, but before this record, I'd never really investigated Deceased. I think I had an impression of them as one of the countless sub–Cannibal Corpse bands who purvey pummeling yet faceless grunt-and-grind over lengthy careers. I could not have been more wrong in this (essentially baseless) preconception, though: Make no mistake, Deceased is a seriously progressive band, and this record is a bona fide epic.

There's definitely some straight-up blasting death metal on Surreal Overdose—their sixth full-length—but there's just as much rollicking hardcore and, crucially, triumphant thrash. I've been getting down to a lot of …And Justice for All and Rust in Peace lately, and this album thrives on a brand of riff obsession that reminds me of that late-’80s/early-’90s tech-thrash flowering. Combine that sensibility with anthemic, punklike choruses and a serious dystopian sci-fi jones and you've got a very vintage-style album, almost Voivod-ish in its obsessive devotion to epic narrative scope, where the music feels like a constantly deepening STORYLINE.

As raw as the band sounds—Fowley's vocals remind me a bit of Sepultura's Max Cavalera—there's a real progginess to this album that I just love. Sound effects, dialogue samples, constant tempo changes, just tons and tons of INTRIGUE and MEMORABILITY. I actually think of this album as not terribly distant from something like David Comes to Life by Fucked Up (which I also really dig)—taking an "extreme" musical style and polishing it with a sort of epic sheen. The result in each case is a best-of-both-worlds scenario—a fascinating marriage of the primitive and the grand. I seriously doubt I will hear a better metal album (let alone death metal) than this in 2011. Hear/buy it via Bandcamp. Here's a track:



Exhumed
All Guts, No Glory (Relapse)

Like Deceased, Exhumed is another band I'd heard of for years that I'd basically written off as generic. (In both cases, maybe the band names had something to do with it?) But thanks to some very intriguing recent coverage over at Invisible Oranges, including this wildly entertaining essay on Metallica's "Trapped Under Ice" by Exhumed guitarist Matt Harvey," I decided to give their new one a look. And man, this album just smokes.

Like on Surreal Overdose, there's a major thrash/hardcore thing going on here, an almost hysterical riff obsession. Exhumed shares with Deceased a certain over-the-top-ness, but if in Deceased that quality plays out in pulpy, nerdy narrative grandiosity, in Exhumed it comes across as more of a heathen-ish zaniness. There's sinister-minded camp all over this record, from the gruesomely funny cover art (depicting the band members as flesh-eating zombies) to the cornball song titles ("Your Funeral, My Feast") and the "one guy shrieking, the other one barfing" dual-vocal approach. But I assure you, this music is absolutely dead serious. The riffage (not to mention the soloing) simply could not be more righteous. I hear this stuff, and I just want to headbang at warp speed. Guitar nerds, you will be in heaven. This one is also on Bandcamp. Here's the aforementioned "Your Funeral…":



P.S. I was super-intrigued when Invisible Oranges labeled the previous Exhumed effort, Anatomy Is Destiny, "the …And Justice for All of goregrind" (in the intro to this Matt Harvey Q&A). Having sampled Anatomy a bit on Spotify over the last few days, I'm glad to report that this assessment isn't far off.

Disma
Towards the Megalith (Profound Lore)\

Incantation—yet another veteran death-metal band that I'd long assumed was kind of marginal. All the same, I knew that they were revered in the underground, so when I heard that a new Profound Lore band, Disma, featured former Incantation member Craig Pillard on the mic, I was intrigued.

Towards the Megalith does not disappoint in the least. If Surreal Overdose and All Guts are all about being pelted with rapid-fire streams of ideas (riffs, words, what have you), Towards the Megalith lumbers along at a much slower pace. Whether moving at molasses-y doom speed or a bottom-heavy midtempo, this band has enormous girth to it. You think of elephants and tanks and other sluggish yet unstoppable forces. Pillard's got a classic death-metal growl-and-gurgle style. Like a lot about Towards the Megalith, his delivery is familiar yet extremely satisfying. This band just wants to create a sense of slo-mo menace, without getting too ponderous or emo about it. The record's title is apt: You really do start to think of ancient societies and their terrifying moonlight rites when you hear this one. You can check out one track over at Stereogum, and one at Profound Lore, where you can also (of course) buy the record.

Autopsy
Macabre Eternal (Peaceville)

Out of all these bands, Autopsy is the one I'd had the most prior experience with. I wasn't hip to their early classics, such as 1991's Mental Funeral, at the time they came out, but I caught up to them over the past few years and was seriously impressed. The band seemed truly committed to taking Sabbathy evil-ness and riff worship and pushing these concepts into the realm of ugly, gross-out death metal. As on the old records, I'm not in love with the delivery of vocalist of Chris Reifert (who, like King Fowley, doubles in drums), who can sound overly cartoonish to me, like a parody of death-metal vocals. But there's a certain camp to what he does that fits in well with Autopsy's relentless garagey vibe. The playing is proficient as hell, but the band plays with a real rock & roll rawness. Unlike some death metal, which seems utterly disconnected from the blues, Autopsy is all about the sludgy churn, the badass midtempo groove. As with their old stuff, it's quite a treat on Macabre Eternal (their picking-up-right-where-they-left-off "comeback") to hear those core hard-rock values married to pulpy, gore-obsessed lyrical themes. Hear some samples and pick up Macabre Eternal at Peaceville.


Cannabis Corpse
Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (Tankcrimes)

What a fantastically fun record this is. As you might guess from the name, Cannabis Corpse started as something of a joke: I'm not quite clear on whether they were actually covering Cannibal Corpse songs (replacing all the blood-and-guts lyrics with lyrics about weed) or simply riffing on Cannibal's song titles and imagery. To be clear, though: Despite the titles punning on classic death-metal tracks by Decide, Morbid Angel and the like, all the current Cannabis material is original, and with this new record, these guys have taken a major step up in the seriousness-of-craft department.

These guys may just have Cannibal Corpse themselves beat when it comes to playing death metal that ROCKS. The orchestration on this album is absolutely incredible: Every instrument has its place, and all the components groove together so hard. (The beautifully clear production doesn't hurt.) The approach reminds me more of something like Thin Lizzy than it does death metal, a genre in which clarity and instrument separation and naturalness-of-sound don't tend to be high priorities. Despite the growly vocals, these guys actually sound like a more thrash-metal-informed version of the Fucking Champs to me than death metal proper. As with the Champs, these guys play extremely CRAFT-FORWARD metal, metal which has no interest in default rawness. They've written some extremely accomplished and detailed songs here, and they obviously want you be able to hear exactly what's going on.

As with every Cannabis Corpse listener, you've probably got preconceptions that they're a joke band, but this is probably the most pro presentation I've heard on a metal record this year: playing, songwriting, orchestration, production—it all just sounds beautiful and you need to hear it. Get thee to Bandcamp! Here's a track: