The most interesting releases of the week!
Excessive Escalation of Cruelty, released on Everlasting Spew, is Tormentor Tyrant‘s debut. The band plays death metal with a heavy emphasis on the genre’s thrash roots, sounding like an attempt to recreate the cover art using your ear drums. The musicians of Tormentor Tyrant have a history of playing together, making this sound like less of a jagged debut and more of a veteran workout.
This album is short and sweet. The guitars never stray too far from Cannibal Corpse chugs during the verses, and while there are a few flairs to the songwriting, those aren’t the focus. What hits you is the performances. The emphatic vocal barks are accented by spectacular drums and guitars that feel completely at home in these grooves. I wish we could see this band flex and experiment, but if this is what they want to do, I’m more than happy to sit back and enjoy.
I love Eternal Champion, Megaton Sword, Sumerlands, and friends. I love Century. The band’s second full length, a release from Electric Assault Records and Dying Victims Productions, is a cheesy album with vocals that range from questionable to the star of the show, drums that are probably just a bit too fuzzy, and snazzy riffs. It’s not new, it’s not refreshing, it’s just heart-warming and entertaining.
I swear I can hear snippets from some of those other bands on Sign of the Storm. Maybe that’s just nostalgic recollection for some of the best moments of a movement that is itself nostalgic recollection. In any case Century wears their sound well. They authentically embody the cheese, the earnest-above-all approach to their sound. The Conquest of Time was great. Check out both if you haven’t.
I hear a bit of Archspire and a lot of The Faceless. Painted Paradise, Fleshbore‘s second full-length, was released on Transcending Obscurity Records. This is pure-fire tech death, designed to sound difficult and flashy. While the result is occasionally overwhelming, it’s more often than not a heartrate-raising experience full of prices drum stuttering, spasming solos, and wild vocal variation.
The songwriting appearch on Painted Paradise seems to be “show off first, think about it second.” It works for them. This is brash music and the production is a bit tiring at times. But the overall package is of an unafraid band that will back up their aggressive choices with skill. Reminds me a bit of Alustrium as well.
Bile of the Gods is Deadspawn‘s second full-length and was released independently. I’ll get to the point: The drumming is great. The rest of the sound works well, but upon first listen the drums stood out as the driving reason to listen to this record. Subsequent listens gave me more to love after I got drawn in. The repeated machine-gun guitar licks combined with some slower riffs that serve as a good counterbalance show that this band knows how to complete a song.
I do wish that the mix was a bit different, as the band struggles to keep all instruments sounding clear (or at least intentionally muddy) when all cylinders are firing. There were also some songwriting choices that sounded like they weren’t fully fleshed out, and some moments where it felt like Deadspawn wasn’t clear how they were going to progress until they got there. But none of that sank Bile of the Gods. Instead what we got was an enjoyable independent death metal record that sounds unique and kept me coming back.
