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EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE: Colosso Offer a Lot More Feast than “Famine” in New Track

January is, historically speaking, not a great month for new music. If anything, the first quarter of the year often feels like the music industry’s expulsion of its unwanted

5 years ago

January is, historically speaking, not a great month for new music. If anything, the first quarter of the year often feels like the music industry’s expulsion of its unwanted end-of-year leftovers, cleaning the slate for bigger, more profitable spring and summer releases. Though this may be the trend in the music world at large, January of the last two years has felt like anything but. My 2019 year-end list included several January releases from that year, and 2020 has thus far presented no less a smorgasbord of incredible music. While the holidays have transpired once more and the bitter cold lingers with little relief in sight, metal has gifted us with some outright bangers, and Portuguese death-dealers Colosso’s fantastic new track “Famine”, from their upcoming release Apocalypse, is no exception. Revel in its madness exclusively here at Heavy Blog Is Heavy!

For those unfamiliar, Colosso play a brand of death metal that mixes atmosphere and aggression with near seamless precision, and “Famine” is a deft display of their prodigious talents as songwriters and musicians. Which is no surprise, seeing as their lineup includes members of Gaerea, Oak, Analepsy, Grog, Norse, and Bleeding Display. It’s quite the pedigree, and Colosso fulfills the promise of these collective talents with a track that mixes profound ugliness and spacy mood-building to near perfection. The closest comparison I can find to the band’s cracked wall of sound is Swedish monstrosity Mylingar, as the searing guitar tone and production feel pummeling in a similar fashion. But Colosso eliminate the brick-walled insanity of Mylingar by incorporating distinct melodic through lines that populate the track, as well as a spacious mix that allows each instrument to be distinctly heard and felt. It’s a decipherable cacophony that allows “Famine” to avoid the pitfalls of death metal’s penchant for overworked insanity by presenting a composition that is discernible and all the more menacing for it. In short, it goes hard and clear.

Apocalypse drops February 14th via the unstoppable Transcending Obscurity Records, and if this track does anything for you I’d sincerely recommend getting your hands on a copy of this brute when it lands. There’s plenty more goodness where “Famine” comes from. In an already crowded and quality January, Colosso stick out from the death metal crowd with a track that should satisfy fans of atmosphere and primal sonic violence in equal measure, and I recommend it highly.

Jonathan Adams

Published 5 years ago