It’s funny how experimental, extreme, and essentially subversive genres become just as susceptible to tropes and cliches as any other genre out there. It probably has something to do with how creativity works, that most of us need a common scaffolding from which to work, leaving the truly wild explorations…
Some music just sounds flat out disgusting. It would be difficult to describe the sounds vomited by bands like Devourment, Aborted, Cryptopsy, and a slew of other more brutally oriented artists as anything less. It’s the kind of music that causes me to occasionally sit back and wonder what, exactly,…
Brutal death metal, especially in its more technical manifestations, has been experiencing something of a renaissance as of late. Devourment, Wormed, Organectomy, Infant Annihilator, Unfathomable Ruination, Disentomb, and a host of others dropped albums in 2019 that could easily be counted among their finest work, setting the table for a…
For eight years, the Canadian tech-death Megazord of Beneath The Massacre have watched their countrymen and neighbours hit the (relative) mainstream in metal with varying degrees of success. It’s a hot product. Having the most technically challenging, mind-bending material and implementing it into the most extreme forms of metal isn’t…
Brutal death metal is a 50/50 proposition for me most of the time. There are several bands in death metal’s nastiest of branches (Wormed, Devourment, Disentomb, Aborted, and Defeated Sanity, for example) that push the boundaries of what the most authoritative sounds in death metal can and should be. However,…
Tech death is a weird branch of the metal tree. Focused primarily on performative fireworks as opposed to standard songwriting structures, the music can at times come across as highly robotic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for me as a listener there’s only so many insane guitar passages…
It’s already been a year full of releases that proudly defy the limitations of genres applied to them. Disentomb’s third full-length, The Decaying Light shoots for this too. The Australian brutal death practitioners made fans wait five years for a new dose of hair raising, skin blistering jams- 2014’s Misery…
Vulvodynia burst into the death metal scene five years ago and have since grown exponentially. You can get the bands merch printed on just about any item or surface imaginable – from backpacks to shower curtains, on sandals and your new child’s birth certificate. Probably. They’ve also put a handful of LPs and EPs, more importantly to the purpose of this review. 2016’s Psychosadistic Design saw the band hit a brutal death metal stride that seemingly disregarded their relative freshness to the genre, and now, three years on, and several more releases from the members’ side projects, the South African’s are back with Mob Justice.
10 years after the release of their debut album, symphonic death metallers Fleshgod Apocalypse are back with Veleno, their fifth full-length. The veterans have done a lot in that time, from the technical death metal of Oracles and Mafia, to the over-the-top insanity of Agony, and most recently to the…
Arguably one of the least represented genres here at Heavy Blog, brutal death metal is shlocky at best and ultra-gimmicky at worst. There is a very limited array of tools for these bands to use and if said band isn’t actually proficient with them, it’s always pretty obvious. Kraanium have…
