Welcome, Hellions, to our last Death’s Door installment of the decade! Wipe your feet on the mat and pull up a bone throne. We’re about to embark on a journey through another fairly amazing year of music. Oh yeah, baby. Let’s go. This year was, for myself at least, a…
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,…
Welcome, Hellions, to Death’s Door. Grab a blood-filled goblet and pull up a bone throne. It’s about to get loud in here. August continued death metal’s string of quality releases, featuring names both big and small making waves in an already overstuffed landscape. While I remain somewhat disappointed by the…
It’s been one year since we first had the idea to invite a staff member to participate in this column. On this occasion (which, of course, doesn’t actually mean anything beyond my brain’s love for round numbers) I’d like to take a brief look with you behind the scenes and…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
Homewrecker has always been about elevating their foundation. Always trying to take tried and true, moshpit catered listening experiences to the next level. On their debut album Worms and Dirt, there was a salad of influences. Pulling from Obituary, Morbid Angel, Merauder and old Hatebreed and integrating that into the same song…
Brutal death metal has the rare benefit of being exactly what it sounds like. The differences one would expect between “regular death metal” and “brutal death metal” are manifold and, by and large, pretty predictable: guitars are more downtuned; riffs are chunkier and more visceral; vocals are far deeper and even less intelligible; the whole nine yards. As far as subgenres go, it doesn’t exactly shake up its progenitor’s foundations by a relatively large amount, choosing instead to just take everything that makes death metal an already pretty brutal genre and crank that bad boy up to 11. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the ensuing auditory carnage is not for the faint of heart, but it is for anybody that feels like extreme metal just isn’t extreme enough yet. If you’ve ever felt that way—the grooves could be groovier, the riffs could be riffier, the blasts could be blastier, the gutturals could be gutturalier—then brutal death metal is the answer to all your prayers. So without further ado, let’s dive in to what our staff considers to the be the Best Of – Brutal Death Metal!
Thrown into a fit of rage. Your blood starts to boil. Your head bangs and the riffs are smashed against whatever part of your brain makes you a metalhead. Ushering in decades of death metal influence, from the seamless slams of Devourment to the standard tremolo pick death metal riff (you know the one), the hardcore band of old washes away against the new death metal landscape Homewrecker has presented. Extinction By Design sees a band not graduate from hardcore, but rather shift gears in the same sonic vehicle to come into their own. This transition has long since been on the horizon. Their incredible mix of powerviolence, hardcore, death metal and grind on Worms and Dirt, and the similarly sounding Circle of Death slowly built towards this death metal iteration of the band. This change was even more evident when we consider that side project Scorched are OSDM worship and splits albums with similar new death metal acts such as Gatecreeper. Th question, however, remains: does this album pay off by going all in on death metal ? Is this even the same band and is their new sound, well, good?
Let’s get your week off to a good start. We like to touch on how much we miss The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza quite a lot here, as they were fast becoming one of the most important names in progressive/maniacally technical deathcore. Now that they ain’t about, I feel it is…
Over the past five years, Kentucky based Louisville Deathfest has compiled solid lineups of both elder-statesman and up-and-comers in extreme metal, including Gorgasm, Rivers of Nihil, Nachtmystium, Enfold Darkness, Young and In the Way, Putrid Pile and Devourment. This year’s installment continues the festival’s strong tradition of composing great bills, as this year’s headliner will be Virginia eminent melodic tech death…
