Decibel #203 - September 2021

OF VOID DEAFHEAVEN TEMPLE CANDIRIA IN THE STUDIO THE LIGHTEST MATTER OF THE UNIVERSE 300 PERCENT DENSITY

HOODED MENACE SCULPTURED HORRENDOUS GOST CEREBRAL ROT FAWN LIMBS

SEPTEMBER 2021 // No. 203

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September 2021 [R 203] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8 metal muthas Horrendous little secrets

14 wormwitch One more for the road

10 low culture But what about Fenriz’s cat?!

16 hour of 13 A little bit of everything all of the time

11 no corporate beer The brew-ture is female

18 fucked up Horsing around

12 in the studio:

20 cerebral rot Gross profit

temple of void Moving on from the world

22 gost Love the skin you’re in 24 dirty vicar High minded, lo-fi 26 krigsgrav United to divide 28 lotus thrones Don’t stand so close to him 30 fawn limbs Math is hard 32 sculptured Ending is the new beginning

features

reviews

34 hooded menace The classics never go out of style

65 lead review Deafheaven create their most daring and least heavy record to date with the paradoxically named Infinite Granite

36 q&a: deafheaven Vocalist George Clarke wins our award for “Least Expected Pull Quote in History” 40 the decibel

hall of fame Candiria tow the line of both audio complexity and mainstream acceptance with 300 Percent Density

66 album reviews Releases from bands that will never know what the fuck a TikTok is, including K.K.’s Priest, Sodom and Wolves in the Throne Room 80 damage ink Fun and games

52

Hell Hath No Fury COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY JASON BLAKE

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. © 2021 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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REFUSE/RESIST

September 2021 [T203] PUBLISHER

I’ve written over 200 Just Words over

the past 17 years, so it’s unsurprising that some of these editor’s notes flow as naturally as the first Krallice album, while others unfold with the unpredictability of the last Krallice album. This piece is decidedly the latter. So, since nothing is coming easy, you’re getting a one-time-only Just Words lightning round of all the started (and then abandoned) concepts for this month’s editor’s notes. Hope you dislike smooth transitions.

•

Today is my birthday. I’m 46, which is a completely insignificant birthday mile-marker. No new privileges or benefits are unlocked at 46—I’m just like extremely middle-aged now. The texts are nice, though, as are the Immortal birthday memes on Facebook, so thanks for those. Definitely a worthy reward for inching that much closer to death.

•

Watching some of you—including a few of you on the masthead to the very right of this column—unleash your Deafheaven scorn is a nearly inexhaustible well of comedy. I’m not even specifically talking about the reaction to the band’s decidedly less-metallic new album (reviewed in this issue quite nicely by Nick Green).

So, if the mere concept of major key signatures and pink album art/blankets residing in the same zip code as black metal was too much for some fragile cultists to bear, welp, the “doo-wop” influence (frontman George Clarke’s words from J. Bennett’s interview elsewhere in this issue) will likely inspire entire DSBM albums about Infinite Granite. While I personally miss the variables of their tension-and-release blackgaze formula, I certainly own enough early-’90s Catherine Wheel, Swervedriver and Slowdive records that this is an easy transition. Unlike this next paragraph for you.

•

Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer: Philly completely sold out while I was writing this. I recounted the agonizing journey between the event’s March 2020 pandemic postponement and its late May 2021 lineup reveal just last issue. This time, instead of whining, I’ll just thank everyone who has supported this event over the years and helped us reach this milestone. I’ve certainly had worse birthday presents. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

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Albert Mudrian

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READER OF THE

MONTH I had heard the title track before seeing the movie, and when those dots all connected, I knew I wanted to be an embalmer. I thought it would be interesting and a chance to be involved with something not everyone gets to see. I started at 20 and took to it right away.

Tom Mahoney New York, NY

You’re a funeral director/embalmer in New York City. How did you get into this line of work?

I started going to college and realized quickly it wasn’t for me. I was looking into trade schools and this one jumped out at me. One of the things that helped lead me towards funeral school was metal and horror movies.

The combination of [Entombed's] Left Hand Path and Phantasm was probably the biggest;

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Do you know any other people in the funeral industry who are also metalheads?

There are other metalheads I met in the industry here. It’s fun when we bump into each other and start talking about bands and shows, or when we run into each other at Saint Vitus.

One of the fun things about meeting metalheads in the funeral industry is that it’s usually a surprise. We are all dressed in suits, and it’s not until you start talking in more detail that you find out they are a metalhead. I think I knew Adam [Romanowski] from Gwynbleidd for like

a month before we found out that we were both into metal.

Pick your favorite of the following three bands: Mortician, Embalmer or, um, Perverted Funeral Home?

In my collection I have a bunch from Mortician and Embalmer, and I’ve seen them both live a bunch of times. That being said, I have a Chainsaw Dismemberment tattoo on my leg, so I’ll go with Mortician. They’re a staple band here in New York.

Those guys even came all the way out when Staten Island tried to revive the L’Amour [metal venue] name, which was the first time I saw them. My friends in Torturous Inception got to open for Mortician in Philly somewhere; that was a great show.

Seriously, this seems like it could be a tough job mentally. How do you unwind and get yourself centered after the grind of working with people who have recently lost loved ones?

The funeral business is, at times, an emotionally demanding job. You have to separate work and home life. Thankfully, I have a very supportive wife, an extensive music collection and my own guitar to get myself back to zero. The only other thing I do to take my mind of work is I’ll go for a run. I put on headphones with some thrash revival band like Lazarus A.D. or Warbringer.

That keeps me going.

Chuck BB is the illustrator of the graphic novels Black Metal, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 For more info and art, head over to chuckbb.com

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month?

Well, here are the records that we spun most while not-so-secretly mocking you for using the term “unclean vocals.”

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month's Mutha: Marybeth Knox Mutha of Jamie of Matt Knox of Horrendous

Tell us a little about yourself.

How did you feel about the name of your sons’ previous punk band, the Raunchy Fucking Bensons?

I’m a Philly girl! I have seven siblings and our house in Fox Chase is backed up to a recreation center. My entire youth was spent on year-round sports. My husband Jim’s youth was similar.

We’ve been married for 36 years and have three sons: Jamie, Matthew and Patrick. Neither one of us played an instrument, but music was always playing in the background of our lives.

What were Jamie and Matt like growing up?

Were they at one another’s throats, best friends, somewhere in between?

Jamie and Matthew are only two years apart, so they were close from the beginning. Patrick was much younger. Our neighborhood was loaded with kids, so they had a ball playing outside.

They both played organized soccer, baseball, basketball and football. I was thrilled when Matthew asked for guitar lessons in fifth grade. Jamie started playing the bass soon after. When their best friend Garrett brought his drums here, our house started rocking and never stopped. They practiced every day, and I loved it! They were rarely at each other’s throats, but for sure there were plenty of tense moments over the years.

Was Jamie always a drummer and Matt a guitarist, or were they interested in other instruments as children?

Matthew was always a guitarist, but Jamie played bass in their punk band up through high school. Jamie started drumming when they hooked up with Damian [Herring] and started playing heavy metal in college in South Carolina.

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Excuse me?! This is the first time I ever heard that name! As far as I knew, their band was called Tell Me Lies. They just admitted to me that nasty name was their dirty little secret. Needless to say, that wouldn’t have been their name back then if I had heard it. I ran a tight ship! I think it’s hilarious now, though.

Horrendous albums have placed in this magazine’s Top 40 list multiple times. What accomplishment of theirs are you most proud of?

I’m blown away by their musical success. Their determination and work ethic are extraordinary, and they come alive when performing. But I’m most proud of the young men they have become; they’re kind, loyal, empathetic, curious and, most of all, they are men of integrity. I’m honored to be their mother. Oh my… have my words ruined their heavy metal reputations?

What’s something most people would be surprised to learn about Jamie and Matt?

Now it’s my turn to divulge a dirty little secret! Jamie has a PhD in immunology from the University of Pennsylvania and works as a researcher by day. Matthew has a Master’s degree in secondary education from the University of South Carolina and teaches high school English.

But if you ask either one how they are doing, the first answer will always be about their music and the latest project they’re working on. Music is definitely their passion! —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Carcass, Torn Arteries  Dungeon Serpent, World of Sorrows  Skepticism, Companion  Deafheaven, Infinite Granite  Candiria, What Doesn’t Kill You… ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Brandy, Gift of Repetition  Optic Sink, Optic Sink  The Three Johns, The World by Storm  Idles, Ultra Mono  Lamps, Lamps ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Candiria, 300 Percent Density  Hush, Body  Stabbing, Demo 2021  Oak, Fin  Esoctrilihum, Dy'th Requiem for the Serpent Telepath ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Carcass, Torn Arteries  Genghis Tron, Dream Weapon  Tomb Mold, Planetary Clairvoyance  Sadistic Intent, Resurrection  Mastiff, Leave Me the Ashes of the Earth ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  At the Gates, The Nightmare of Being  Persekutor, Permanent Winter  Exodus, Bonded by Blood  Söft Dov, Massacre Through Seduction  Crypt Sermon, Out of the Garden

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Mike “Gunface” McKenzie : the red chord, stomach earth, u m b r a v i ta e , w e a r y o u r w o u n d s  Testament, The Legacy  Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Gustavo Santaolalla, Mogwai, Before the Flood soundtrack  Xoth, Interdimensional Invocations  Miasmatic Necrosis, Apex Profane  MF Doom, Mm..Food

Dark Thrones and Lengthy Think Pieces have a rather complicated relationship

with Darkthrone. It’s one that—three decades into listening to them—I’m not entirely sure I’ve come to terms with. I’ve tried to work it out in my head over the last decade, but it just keeps slipping around, a realization just out of reach.

The first time I heard them was on a college radio show in New Jersey: “The Hours of Desolation,” if I’m not misremembering it. I was a sophomore in high school, just absorbing as much death metal and weird dark shit as I could.

Darkthrone were a revelation—not just musically, but aesthetically. A cultural touchstone, for me at least. Years later, even as I got deeper and deeper into the underground, they just held this special place for me. Even upon the release of 1999’s divisive Ravishing Grimness, I still found myself placing them on this pedestal. Sure, I knew plenty of black metal musicians personally, but these guys were somehow different, this untouchable evil that continued to push perfect records into the world. Then Plaguewielder happened.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with that record or its follow-up, Hate Them, except they were a bit plain to me, missing the original magic except for a song or two. But still, I believed. And was rewarded with 2004’s Sardonic Wrath, the last perfect Darkthrone record for a decade, and what a friend referred to as “the last hateful Darkthrone record before Fenriz discovered the internet.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. The veil was being lifted, not only on them, but a lot of what was tinting my glasses a shade of rose. (Nocturno Culto’s curious The Misanthrope documentary was released shortly thereafter, but it kept the aura surrounding the band continuously weird.)

After Sardonic Wrath, they started going into different directions, less “black” more “metal.”

We started getting shit like Until the Light Takes Us and the shift of Fenriz from being the spearhead of Norwegian black metal into an uncle figure, more concerned with talking about his record collection in lyrics than anything resembling the dark themes of the early ’90s.

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I can’t fault him for wanting to do something different; that’s a product of aging, and stagnation breeds bland, beige sonics. But I ceased being a believer, though I harbored no ill will. At that time, I was on my own strange musical trip, oddly mirroring a sentence I’d read from Fenriz years early about his ears being “hungry.” I dropped out of black metal— the mystery behind it had faded the more I was thrust into the people and business. I had a lot of negative things happening, I fell into a tunnel. By the time I emerged from the other end, there were two albums that I’d missed: Dark Thrones and Black Flags and Circle the Wagons. And I ended up loving them both.

I was fully on board with this new era of the band. Then they did their heavy metal record with epic songs that were loaded with cliches— obviously genuiely produced out of love—but I fucking hate heavy metal. And so, I was off the (cough) wagon again; the excitement of a new Darkthrone faded as they were on a nearly annual release cycle.

Then, just two years ago, Old Star appeared, and it sounded like Darkthrone performing an Amebix record. Additionally, it sounded like black metal again, albeit very old black metal. I didn’t hear a reference to any record Fenriz owned in the lyrics. It was fucking awesome. I wish I could say the same about Eternal Hails……, but I’ve only heard one track, and between the heavy metal stylings and Fenriz’s cheesy “ETERNAL! HAILS!” vocal, I’m just uninterested in this one.

Darkthrone represent aging to me, where there are great memories and moments at points along the way, but nothing has the impact of when you were young. And maturity can be a benchmark, or it could lead to a midlife crisis (see last year’s Isengard record).

But even after such a rocky long-term relationship, I’m sure I’ll still follow what they’re doing until one of us drops dead. Because that’s the nature of my complicated relationship with them, one I’ll ponder deep into old age.

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

I

The Road Ahead for Craft Beer to Eradicate

t’s not news, but an overdue wakeup call. After Brienne Allan asked other womxn in beer about sexism they’d experienced, thousands of stories poured in, which Allan began sharing in her Instagram stories at @ratmagnet.

Now, craft beer is confronting its pervasive sexism and abuse.

Last month, we discussed steps that breweries are taking to address systemic racism.

The work begins now, too, to overhaul the industry and create something safe, welcoming and equitable for womxn. Ash Eliot is the founder of Women of the Bevolution, a group she started after entering beer after over a decade in music. It began as a way to connect, provide safe spaces and help with job opportunities. Over the past weeks, Eliot says it has evolved into an advocacy group.

We spoke about beer’s dire need for change and the way forward.

What do you think some of the core ways that craft beer has been failing women as well as people of color, and what is the impact of that?

By marginalizing women, non-binary individuals, BIPOC and LGBTQ+, you’re not only missing out on a key opportunity to engage a diverse consumer, you’re missing out on learning from these diverse voices how you can do business better. As a business that can influence culture and build community, you have a responsibility to uphold because anything you do will affect

Evolution Through Bevolution  Ash Eliot, founder of Women of the Bevolution, wants to empower women in craft beer industry

society and future generations. If you don’t have women and a diverse staff, especially on the production side, then you’re part of the problem and you’re suppressing an entire group of people.

What are some immediate resources and steps you’d recommend for people who want to get dialed in here and learn how they can contribute to positive change?

If you haven’t seen the stories from thousands of women in the industry, then first go to @RatMagnet’s Instagram highlights, and start following the new account where stories are now being shared, @EmboldenActAdvance. Reach out to women you know in beer and hospitality to show your solidarity and that you want to advocate with them for change.

Look around at your favorite brewery or bar and ask yourself what are they doing to make this a more inclusive environment. Look at the staff, the menu selection, the decor and social media. Where do they stand? What is their policy to keep female customers safe, too?

There are also helpful guides and resources available at WomenoftheBevolution.com.

What do you want to see for the future of craft beer as an industry? What do you think craft beer could and should be?

It’s not going to be easy, but yes, it needs to be saved because it does have such an influential place in culture. And it needs to be inclusive and progressive; otherwise the industry will get left in the dust. Whether you notice it or not, beer is everywhere. For example, in music, every festival organizer and venue owner should be looking at what breweries and brands they work with because that decision influences massive amounts of people who are highly engaged.

The industry needs real action, and that includes businesses stepping up to do better, listen and learn from diverse voices, and be part of this movement for change.

Consumers, hold these businesses accountable, because that’s truly the only way change will happen.

I am hopeful that, out of this, more women will start their own businesses and collaborate. What we really need is more womanowned businesses in the industry. And I hope Women of the Bevolution can be part of their story and amplify that in any way possible.

DECIBEL : SEP T EMBER 2 0 21 : 11

TEMPLE OF VOID

STUDIO REPORT

TEMPLE OF VOID

D

etroit death/doom heavies Temple of Void released their

The World That Was LP as the world was shutting down in March 2020. Instead of mourning their murdered tour plans, they immediately started writing the album’s successor. Guitarist Alex Awn just returned from a family vacation ALBUM TITLE when he beckons a few of his Void brothers to chat with Decibel TBA about the currently untitled upcoming album.

LABEL “I think this [album] will really resonate with fans of the Relapse last record,” Awn offers. “You’ll recognize Temple of Void in ENGINEER every note of every song, but part of the band is expecting the Arthur Rizk unexpected. There will be curveballs so you can’t fully anticipate RECORDING DATES everything coming.”

The new album is fully recorded, outside of some synth and March 24-29 sound design contributions from recurring collaborators Omar RELEASE DATE Jon Ajluni and Meredith Davidson. All of the tracks are now in TBA (late 2021/early 2022) the hands of engineer Arthur Rizk, who has worked with bands as diverse as Integrity, Cirith Ungol, Uada and Pissed Jeans—a personal favorite of drummer Jason Pearce.

“You can’t really connect any of [Rizk’s] albums sonically; they just sound good,” Awn raves.

“I didn’t want to go to an engineer where I knew exactly what it would sound like. I was afraid of that, because we want to sound like Temple of Void; we don’t want to go through a filter and

sound like a cookie cutter for a certain producer’s sound.”

“I actually met Arthur a few years ago at a venue I was working at,” mentions guitarist Don Durr.

“He was easygoing, super cool and laid-back, and that was a big part of our choice, too. I also think his overall reputation has been very positive. He has cool ideas and he’s open to trying anything.”

Although the release date is still unknown, the album will be Temple of Void’s Relapse debut.

They speak glowingly about the label’s reign of excellence during the call, name-dropping a list of albums and bands that lured them deeper into exploring extreme metal.

“The legacy of the label is huge,” Durr concurs. “Being around for over 30 years, from Incantation to Dying Fetus and Misery Index— the [Relapse distributed] Death… Is Just the Beginning comp was my introduction to death metal. It’s sort of like things coming full-circle in that regard.” —SEAN FRASIER

STUDIO SHORT SHOTS

DENVER DOOMSTERS DREADNOUGHT DIG DEEP FOR DEMONS Dreadnought vocalist/guitarist/flautist Kelly Schilling is using part of her day off from recording the doom-prog band’s fifth full-length to gush about a week under the watchful eye and ear of producer Pete deBoer (Blood Incantation, Wayfarer) at Denver-based World Famous Studios. With drums, bass and guitars complete, Schilling sounds absolutely ebullient about how “this album sounds massive and is our most focused and mature record yet.” That’s what you get when you’re “the most prepared we’ve ever been going into the studio.”

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But it’s after we inquire about potential themes for the still-untitled album that the real fun starts. “[Drummer] Jordan [Clancy] wrote a little paragraph about what the album is about, so I’ll read it: ‘Imagine being chased by a legion of post-apocalyptic cult bandits. Traversing brooding mountain landscapes under the moonlight, discovering tunnel systems with ancient artifacts, unleashing your inner demons, casting them to do your bidding before entering a final showdown of wit and will with the most sinister of modern-day monsters.’ There’s definitely a storyline, and we’re exploring the shadow side of human nature.”

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

WORMWITCH

WORMWITCH

Vancouver black ‘n’ rollers refine while confined

W

olf hex is a return for Canadian black metal entity Wormwitch—not only from the forced break caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but a return to form in the band’s condition. Following the release of 2019’s Heaven That Dwells Within—already a substantial leap forward from their crusted-over black ‘n’ roll debut, Strike Mortal Soil—Wormwitch completed a handful of tours before calling a hiatus. ¶ “We just kind of stopped,” guitarist Colby Hink says. “We were really burned out and our relationship with the band was unhealthy.

We had personal stuff we had to deal with, so we stopped indefinitely because touring was tearing us to shreds.” ¶ Shortly after the band decided to resume activity and write a new album, the world was struck by the pandemic. Though Wormwitch were able to continue writing and recording their new album, it effectively placed a lid on the Canadians’ activity for two years.

Reflecting upon it, Hink sees it as a good thing and believes they’ll be able to resume touring with the rest of the country.

14 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

He tells Decibel that writing Wolf Hex was an experience made both easier and more challenging because of COVID-19. On one hand, Hink was unemployed and had much more free time to work on song ideas.

On the other, touring and all other social activity had come to a screeching halt, effectively cutting off some of the main sources of inspiration for the band.

Ultimately, the guitarist says that the songs—which were written at the beginning of the pandemic, before burnout set in—came easily even with stunted inspiration, thanks to pent-up energy from Wormwitch’s earlier self-imposed hiatus. For all the seriousness of Wolf Hex, Wormwitch aren’t afraid to have fun. The record ends with a ripping cover of Metallica’s “Hit the Lights.”

“We chose that song because it’s an awesome song and we love it, but we felt like it would be kind of a ballsy move to cover Metallica,” Hink explains. “We’re often talking in the fantasy realm about songs to cover and how cool it would be to cover such-and-such song, so the song that does get covered on the record is one of many that we stay stoked about.”

Despite a rocky relationship with the road in the time leading up to Wolf Hex, Hink says that Wormwitch are eager to return to touring again: “We’ve had our heads back in the game this whole time and we’ve been chomping at the bit waiting for things to open back up again. We’re looking forward to it more than ever because the next tours we do, we’ll have a better time than we’ve ever had, and we’ll be a better band than we’ve ever been.” —VINCE BELLINO

HOUR OF 13

HOUR OF 13

Chad Davis’ fixation on the darkness yields solo doom nirvana

H

our of 13] in its conception was a record label. Then it was a death rock band. Then it became the debut album.

Now it’s the band with a cult following and influence on the modern metal scene. I don’t question its evolution. It has its own lifeforce.” ¶ So messages Chad Davis about Hour of 13, a timeless invocation of Black Magick Rites, also the title of his fourth LP. The first completely solo ritual for the North Carolina summoner turned San Franciscan, it decants the same trademark production found on the sect’s self-titled 2007 bow: a deathless spell of proto-extremity from the first ages of metal. ¶ Deliberate and strutting, a Satanic tempo grounds and resounds the classic fretwork and cymbal spatter, a relentless menace buckling you into submission. The title track makes corporeal that which edges mankind into damnation: our own base desires. “House of Death” and “Within the Pentagram” shudder anthemically, but more so seep into the listener like black metal slowed to 23 rpms.

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Auto-released last year, Black Magick Rites rises once again via they who consecrated Ho13’s debut, Shadow Kingdom.

“I wouldn’t say ‘self-released,’ as I put it up on Bandcamp for 24 hours for the fans to have a peek at it,” corrects Davis. “The deal with Shadow Kingdom was already in place then, and has been for quite some time. This album has been recorded and re-recorded since 2014 many different times, as I just couldn’t get the proper atmosphere I was looking for until now.

“The early sessions felt like they were forced: not genuine, not good,” he continues. “Only one recording of the album was not destroyed—a whole album of 1980s-style metal that will be released at a later date. Some parts were redesigned with new movements and so on, but once the majority of the riffs on this record

emerged, I knew they were the right direction to go.

“It’s murky, gloomy, downright evil. Darkness is a big part of this life for me, and these riffs contain that darkness. And it doesn’t sound like ANYONE. It’s a completely 100 percent original album. And I’m proud of that.”

On firestarter “His Majesty of the Wood,” Davis intones, “a fable of death and sorcery” starring “the lord of pestilence,” yet in the opening verse, he does so with an earnest reverence that puts over Black Magick Rites hook, line and sinker.

“I tried to not sing the usual way I do and experimented with a few different things,” he offers. “I was ‘in the zone,’ whatever that means.

I sing out of necessity, not out of wanting. The vocal takes were on point and fit the style of the music, so I didn’t question it. I guess it worked!” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

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TANGAROA

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Ancient Roman themed juggernaut EX DEO return with a cinematic soundscape of death metal supremacy! Featuring members of Kataklysm, Carach Angren and Venom Inc. | RIYL: Nile, Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir

the thirteen years of nero

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ANDREW W.K.’s euphoric party power is harder than ever on God Is Partying.

GOD IS PARTYING

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FUCKED UP

FUCKED UP

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race yourself for impact: The latest installment in Fucked Up’s “Chinese Zodiac” series is over 90 minutes long, with four songs and a dense, interconnected storyline. Year of the Horse is impossibly overstuffed, with the band’s hallmark keen melodicism mashed up with some of Fucked Up’s most bruising parts ever, “We’ve always thought we could get away with whatever we wanted to,” explains guitarist/vocalist Mike Haliechuk. “Structurally, this album is just an opera—which is a form that is hundreds of years old.

So, it’s actually our most conservative release, but people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that an aggressive-sounding band is experimenting with old formats.” ¶ This isn’t even the first time that the Canadian sextet has tried its hand at crafting a song cycle to be interpreted by a disparate set of voices; the group’s third album—2011’s career-defining full-length David Comes to Life—radically reinvented the rock opera format. Year of the Horse is every bit as immersive, with an arc that explores “the deep myths of our civilization.”

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It’s a “headphones album” in every sense, narrated by the voices of the band themselves, along with guests like Matt Berninger of the National and a series of vocalists that drummer Jonah Falco became acquainted with after moving to the U.K. The heavy parts on Year of the Horse, particularly the opening of “Act Two,” communicate a sense of loss and longing; the album is dedicated to two Texas scene stalwarts who passed away unexpectedly last year: Power Trip’s Riley Gale and Iron Age’s Wade Allison. Haliechuk and Falco both collaborated with the former in Masterpiece Machine and Fucked Up shared multiple bills with Iron Age over the last 15 years. “We met both of them years ago and stayed connected because we saw ourselves in them,” Haliechuk says. “Both had an incredible impact in developing the state of heavy music as we know it,

and the legacy that Riley and Wade left should be obvious to anyone who reads this magazine.”

Haliechuk is quick to point out that Year of the Horse has been in development since 2015, and that the process of putting most of the Fucked Up releases together is slow and meticulous. Haliechuk, Falco, bassist Sandy Miranda and vocalist Damian Abraham all recorded their parts in separate studios.

“We worked on Horse a few times a year for three or four years, and I’d spend months just listening to the sessions, coming up with ways to extend things,” he notes, acknowledging that the band might need to explore alternate strategies for completing the Chinese Zodiac project. “One idea is to make the final three a trilogy so we can work on them all at once and it won’t be, like, 2040 before we’re finally done.” —NICK GREEN

PHOTO BY NATALIE WOOD

Hardcore heroes pony up their “most conservative” rock opera

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Los Angeles, CA’s TEETH return with a blistering 5 song offering entitled “Finite”!

Produced, mixed and mastered by Erol Ulug (Our Place of Worship is Silence, Swampbeast) at Bright Lights Studios and featuring artwork by Mark Erskine.

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Brooklyn NY’s blistering indie rockers JUDAS KNIFE present their Translation Loss debut entitled “Death is the Thing with Feathers”.

Recorded by Kurt Ballou (Converge, Dylan Carlson) and featuring members of the beloved 90’s bands Into Another and Garrison (both of Revelation Records).

24th OUT SEPTEMVBER I N Y L / D I G I TA L

genocidal rite Providence, RI’s Doom/Sludge purveyors, CHURCHBURN celebrate their 10 year anniversary with their most accomplished album yet entitled “Genocidal Rite”. Featuring ex-members of Vital Remains and Greif!

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OUR PLACE OF WORSHIP IS SILENCE D I S A V O W E D, A N D L E F T H O P E L E S S

Uncompromising and utterly bleak, OUR PLACE OF WORSHIP IS SILENCE present their newest offering and sophomore TL follow up entitled “Disavowed, and Left Hopeless”. Seven songs of cripplingly depressing blackened death.

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Erol Ulug (Teeth) and featuring artwork by Jon Zig (Deeds of Flesh, Vile, Disgorge).

O U T AU G U S T 2 7th VINYL/TAPE/DIGITAL

This Never Happened

“This Never Happened”, the third full length record from Philadelphia’s legendary metallic hardcore hybrid ALL ELSE FAILED finally sees a proper vinyl release... 17 years in the making!

Featuring Chris Pennie (The Dillinger Escape Plan) on drums.

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OUT OCTOBER 1 VINYL/DIGITAL

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CEREBRAL ROT

CEREBRAL ROT Death metal sickos head back to the festering bog on their second LP

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ou can buy all the ultra-strength Ajax and heavy-duty scouring pads that your bank account can handle—if a Cerebral Rot song has passed through your ear canals, that stench ain’t coming out for a long time. To their credit, that’s by nefarious design. With a 2018 demo that included a song called “Primordial Soup of Radioactive Sewage,” the Seattle-based quartet’s sadistic intentions have been crystal clear from the jump, and with 2019’s standout full-length Odious Descent Into Decay, they claimed a well-earned spot in the upper echelon of old-school death metal revivalists. Now, a mere 22 months later, Excretion of Mortality has crawled forth from the putrid ooze to solidify what purists have known since the beginning: This band has no time to fuck around. ¶ “By the time Odious came out, we had already written the music for ‘Spewing Purulence’ and ‘Vile Yolk of Contagion,’” says guitarist/vocalist Ian Schwab of the relatively short turnaround. “The pandemic didn’t really affect us besides the obvious ‘no shows’ thing.

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We still got to practice on a normal schedule, so at least we had that.

[With this album] we wanted to further develop our sound with darker riffs and atmosphere, as well as better songwriting in general, and I think we achieved that pretty well.”

His analysis is spot-on—with its memorable riffs, unsettling guitar solos and cavernous aura, Excretion of Mortality drags Cerebral Rot’s already disgusting approach into new pits of sonic depravity. As with all of their previous releases, the band enlisted the recording and mixing expertise of Detto Vincent Detto who recorded the LP at Soundhouse and mixed the record at Sentinel.

“Detto is the only person I will record with. He’s extremely easy to work with, he knows what he’s doing and he just gets it. He mainly deals in analog tape recording and

he also has great input on ways to get the dark, nasty sound that we’re looking for.”

Of course, sound can only take you so far. To truly dial in the sickness, you must embrace grotesquery in all of its sensory forms, which Excretion of Mortality deftly achieves with its nauseating cover art and song titles (“Retching Innards,” anyone?). But Schwab and his bandmates—bassist Zach Nehl, guitarist Clyle Lindstrom and drummer Drew O’Bryant—don’t see this as some sort of noteworthy accomplishment; it’s simply an extension of their collective affinity for all things vile. “[There’s] not just one thing that makes up our filth—it’s the whole disgusting package,” offers Schwab.

“We’re also into stuff like gore, vomit and poop jokes outside of music, so I feel like that adds to the overall gross aesthetic.” —MATT SOLIS

GOST

GOST

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eet james lollar. The musician formerly known as Baalberith hid behind a skull mask and then corpsepaint for the first part of his career. Now he’s ready to step out of the darkness. Alongside the pseudonym, he’s shed his association with the darksynth movement that Gost’s seminal albums like Non Paradisi and Behemoth helped define. Whereas the skeleton face felt suffocating, his new direction offers him freedom. ¶ “With Valediction, I wanted to do something completely different to kind of break away from being in the same boat as some of my counterparts—who are also my friends—but, you know, any time that my name is mentioned it’s mentioned with a few of the other big synth guys,” Lollar says. “With the new album, it was weird, dude—I usually put a lot of focus into things, but with this one I guess with the stress level of everything and having extra time, it just kind of came together. Looking back on it, I don’t really remember even writing half of it. Not because I was wasted or anything. It was just a really easy process.”

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Lollar recorded Rites of Love and Reverence while in quarantine and unable to tour. The frustration of locking down while watching other people in his Texas town go about their everyday lives like nothing was wrong fed into the angrier sounds and themes found within. “When I was writing it, it was at the height of the pandemic and all the political discourse,” he says, “and it just kind of felt like a dystopian kind of time and really militant, so I wanted the album to have that kind of vibe because that’s where my head was.”

Some of the songs definitely wouldn’t feel out of place on a ’90s Cleopatra compilation, but with actual good production—“Blessed Be” rocks some serious Sisters of Mercy arena goth vibes, “The Fear” could totally soundtrack a sexy

goth club scene in a vampire flick, and “November Is Death” comes wrapped in shiny latex. Still, the way Lollar combines black metal gnarliness, goth melancholy and hard-hitting EBM beats makes this latest iteration of Gost its own unique thing.

“I can only write the same type of synth song so many times before it feels cheap to me,” he shares.

“I think it’s wild when people are surprised when artists progress because everybody changes, and I change a lot. My music taste changes weekly sometimes. That’s why I’m dropping the Baalberith thing and putting my name out there and my face out there—because it’s more personal and it’s coming from more of the things I like and more of the way I want to be making music now.” —JEFF TREPPEL

PHOTO BY GOST

Texan darksynth pioneer unmasks, goes goth, delivers better album than Lick It Up

DIRTY VICAR

DIRTY VICAR

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t’s tempting to call Dirty Vicar the Darkthrone of Greater Vancouver. Comprised of two veteran musicians in multiinstrumentalist Rob Hughes and vocalist/lyricist Kyle Harcott, the band—named after the classic Monty Python sketch—started as a studio side project, but when their previous outfit didn’t survive the pandemic, Dirty Vicar became their primary focus. Since then, they’ve been bashing out raw, deliberately lo-fi, fist-bangin’ jams that mine the best sounds of vintage underground metal, as heard on the new EP Higher Roads Less Traveled. ¶ “We’ve managed to muddle through [the pandemic],” says Hughes. “[We lost] our jam space earlier this year, but that was due to the depressing churn of Vancouver real estate more than anything else. We’ve never had to record remotely. Kyle has been in my bubble the whole time, so our vocal sessions have always been in person. The rest of the time it’s just me surrounded by microphones and patch cables, working away.” ¶ What sets Dirty Vicar apart from other lofi metal projects is how much fun the duo has experimenting

24 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

within the minimal stylistic parameters they’ve set for themselves.

You hear elements of Voivod one moment, Venom the next, Hawkwind the next. The EP’s apocalyptic standout “Like Lemmings” sounds like “Orgasmatron” as interpreted

by Killing Joke, with Harcott snarling away like the bastard child of Quorthon and Midnight’s Athenar.

“The appeal lies in the triumph of ideas and the purity of their execution,” Hughes explains. “Heavy metal is an incredibly democratic genre. If you can shred in [the] Phrygian dominant [scale], great; if you’ve just figured out power chords, that’s cool, too. If you have ideas, imagination and willpower, you can make something happen for yourself. Especially in the early days, before lo-fi became an aesthetic, you’d have bands going into the cheapest studio they could find, working with engineers who

had no idea what this music was, and they’d still come out with a masterpiece because their ideas survived the process. That’s magic to me. Dozens of ‘How to Record Metal’ YouTubers would be appalled by how Kyle and I put this EP together, but as long as we’re able to get the songs across to people, I’m happy.”

Whether or not Dirty Vicar can assemble a full band lineup for live performances remains to be seen. But Hughes does promise plenty more weirdness from his home studio: “I think about tracks on the peak Black Sabbath albums like ‘Who Are You?’ and ‘Supertzar’ where, sure, it’s mostly Moog or a male choir or whatever, but it’s still very much Sabbath. We’ve already got a pretty moody track written for the next release that I hope will surprise some people.”

—ADRIEN BEGRAND

PHOTO BY ARTURS FEISTS

Vancouver duo infiltrates the lo-fi metal clergy

HE L L HA MM E R RECO RD S P RE S E N T S

From the ashes of cult underground metal stalwarts ACHERON comes the debut release from VINCENT CROWLEY.

OUT NOW

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KRIGSGRAV

KRIGSGRAV

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exas-based black metallers Krigsgrav may not be on the forefront of genre cognoscenti, but after six full-lengths, that’s likely going to change. New album The Sundering (Wise Blood) excels at everything modern-day black metal isn’t after rolling large through the crossroads of Dawn, Katatonia and Wolves in the Throne Room. The Sundering is acrimonious, melancholic and resolute through its nine-song course.

American black metal has had its leading lights, but few are of Krigsgrav’s quality. ¶ “The Sundering is the most direct and inyour-face album we have made,” offers guitarist Justin Coleman.

“The goal for us with every album is to explore something we haven’t done, and we’ve never really made an album that is almost all fast-paced from start to finish.” ¶ Formed by David Sikora (a.k.a. Vortigern) in the twilight of 2004, Krigsgrav delivered their first full-length, The Leviathan Crown, as an independent release in 2010. Since then, Sikora and Coleman (who joined in 2012) have displayed a hard-working spirit, arming Krigsgrav in the shadows masterfully. The group’s 2018 effort, Leave No Path to Follow, was particularly substantial, but it has been the addition of guitarist Cody Daniels (Giant of the Mountain) 26 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

that has set fire to the heart of Krigsgrav. This is no more evident than on “Absence,” “To Live and Die Without Hope” and album capper “Darkest Road,” three of The Sundering’s most emotionally charged tracks.

“Cody’s impact was almost immediate,” Coleman says. “David and I had the idea of what we wanted The Sundering to be conceptually and musically. We knew how we wanted the songs to flow, and we had a few ideas when we explained the vision to Cody. He wrote the track ‘Absence,’ and we knew immediately that this was the kind of energy that we needed to capture in every song throughout the rest of the album. That’s really how the album and Krigsgrav as a whole came together.”

Moored by a personal, yet existential lyrical center, The Sundering captures the other side of black metal’s seared heart: inexorable dread. Inspired by the devastating hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast city of Galveston in 1900, Coleman

wove the tragedy (and its outcome) through Krigsgrav’s overcast aesthetic. Dubbed the “Great Galveston Hurricane,” Mother Nature’s supreme anger killed 8,000 people, leveled everything it came across, but the people of the city rebounded, a testament of will and perseverance.

If that doesn’t define Krigsgrav, we’re not sure what else will.

“A few years ago, I was on the beach in Galveston on a rainy day,” says Coleman. “It just had this dead-heavy feeling to it. I started thinking about what it would be like to have a giant wall of water coming toward you—what can you do? Researching that hurricane and how Galveston rebuilt itself was inspiring. I have always gravitated toward this nature versus man concept: urban landscapes reclaimed by nature, the power of the sea come to shore, post-apocalyptic chaos. It all speaks to something fundamental inside. A need to survive in a hostile environment. I think on some base level that hits us all.” —CHRIS DICK

PHOTO BY ERIK BREDTHAUER

USBM’s unsung second-wave heroes prepare to step outside the genre shadows

LOTUS THRONES

Ex-Wolvhammer drummer reshapes punk that came on sophisticated solo debut

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ou’re all too fucking close to me,” Heath Rave groans over and over as the viscid dirge “Fatigue” lurches to its climax, before finally switching it up to, “It’s all too close to fucking me.” On first blush, it’s a strange sentiment given that Lovers in Wartime—the former Wolvhammer drummer’s solo debut under the moniker Lotus Thrones—was conceived, incubated and birthed during a year-plus stretch where nobody was too fucking close to anyone (especially, short of Walmarts and MAGA rallies, in our man’s hometown of Sioux Falls, SD). But Rave—a recovering addict four years clean as of this June—reminds us that, oh yeah, there was life before COVID. ¶ “It’s a reference to when I set my life on fire before I got clean,” the now multi-instrumentalist divulges. “Everyone was getting in too close and starting to know my secrets, and I was fucking people over. It’s about knowing that terrible things you’ve done are about to fucking take your head off.” ¶ Well, everything’s out of the bag now, except the vast majority of Rave’s secrets today are of the breathtakingly good variety.

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Culling inspiration from artists as disparate as Killing Joke, Danzig, Portishead and the Cure (while still retaining strands of Wolvhammer’s black ‘n’ roll DNA), Lovers in Wartime is an artfully modulated eight-song debut that is alternately depressive, indignant and painfully candid. Metalgaze-inflected death rock pounders like “The Quarry” and “Diametric Retrograde” nestle alongside a narcotic reinterpretation of Bad Brains’ “I and I Survive” (“I was listening to Love and Hate in Dub by Godflesh and wondered what it would sound like if [Justin Broadrick] covered it. Not so much Godflesh, but if Jesu did it”) and instrumental interludes augmented by Yakuza mainman Bruce Lamont’s noirish sax wails.

“It’s a fucking punk record,” Rave asserts. “It’s all emotion. I guess there’s some grandiosity and dramatics to it in a Neurosis sense, but virtuosity? By no means. It’s a hammer to the head.”

This hardly spilled out overnight. When asked if he was dabbling in other instruments in the Wolvhammer years, Rave laughingly quips, “I was only dabbling in cocaine. And not even dabbling—I was fucking Scarface while those guys did all the work.” Now relocated in Philadelphia with his wife and child (and garnering, ahem, raves for his equally intricate work at Seven Swords Tattoo Company), Rave is quick to give credit to everybody but himself for his rebirth as Lotus Thrones—in particular ubiquitous extreme music producer Sanford Parker.

“When I [sent him ‘Diametric Retrograde’], I was like, ‘Dude, is this… good?’ He sent me back something like, ‘Holy Sisters of the Nephilim!’” Rave laughs, “But he doesn’t pander to people either.

That’s why I work with him: He won’t pull punches with me.”

—ANDREW BONAZELLI

PHOTO BY NELL HOVING

LOTUS THRONES

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FAWN LIMBS

FAWN LIMBS

Experimental grinding outfit expands multinational base and multilateral sound

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rite music, record music, release music, play music live. Poll every band ever, and those are the goals of almost every collective to have ever strapped on instruments—the outliers being cover bands looking for free beer and wedding bands looking for free cake. The advent of technology has made three of those four activities as easy as pie these days, even for a band like transcontinental “geometric noise/mathematical chaos” trio Fawn Limbs. But with a gigantic ocean acting as a physical barrier between the band’s members, it’s no surprise the goal of playing live has been pushed into afterthought territory. ¶ “Our initial goal was to just write and release music,” admits guitarist/vocalist Eeli Helin. “Simple as that, and it was pretty clear right away we wanted to take it seriously. Those goals have remained the same because there are obvious difficulties if we were to perform live, like that ocean. [Laughs] And that we would need extra members to fill out the sound. So, it’s not something we’re actively pursuing, but the idea pops up now and again.” ¶ With the possibility of a live energy explosion taken off the table, 30 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Finnish native Helin, New York-based bassist Samuel Smith (Artificial Brain) and Pennsylvanian drummer Lee Fischer (Infinite Nomad, ex-Psyopus, Commit Suicide) redirected their intensity into fucking things up via the sonic redline gut punch/St. Vitus slam dance of a nine-release discography. This includes forthcoming third fulllength Darwin Falls, on which Fawn Limbs uproot their Brutal Truth, Locust and Discordance Axis influences and add Imperial Triumphant oddities, Meshuggah-like chug and the eerie drone of Naked City’s Grand Guignol. All those elements are tied together with a spoken-word narrative concerning “solitary survival after a devastating incident,” not to mention appearances by classical musicians from as far afield as Colombia, the U.K., New Zealand and Switzerland.

“Fawn Limbs began after Lee and I started talking about wanting to start a new mathcore/grindcore/

noise-oriented band in 2018,” Helin explains. “I had some songs written .... and those five songs turned out to be our first EP, Towing Heads, which we finished in a month and released that August. I got fed up with playing bass, so Lee suggested reaching out to Sam, who was on board immediately.

“After our first two EPs, Lee and I started talking about doing another project with the three more experimental tracks that became the Thrum EP. We always had the attitude of pushing ourselves and the boundaries of this music. So, we decided we didn’t need another project and released that EP as Fawn Limbs. After our second album, Sleeper Vessels, which was more noise/ grind/mathcore, we thought there was still more to explore in the direction of Thrum, so we’ve made the new album a mix-and-match of everything we’ve done—more open-ended, improvisational and freeform.” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

ONE DARK NIGHT:

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SCULPTURED

SCULPTURED

After decade-long hiatus, former Agalloch members embody the liminal

R

eturning after a 13-year break following 2008’s death metal-inspired Embodiment, The Liminal Phase ushers in a new era for longstanding underground progressive metal band Sculptured. “I’ve had ideas going since 2010,” guitarist/vocalist Don Anderson explains, “but it wasn’t until after Agalloch broke up in 2016 that I really dug in and wrapped the main songwriting. The attention I was able to give Sculptured was ultimately determined by the attention I had to give Agalloch and my academic career.” ¶ With a new era comes a new sound and a new lineup—this time around featuring Andy Winter (who originally joined the band for Embodiment) handling keyboards, Martti Hill on drums and Marius Sjøli performing guitar and lead vocals—joining the core lineup of Anderson and bassist Jason William Walton. “I love working with new people and encouraging them to exercise total freedom with what they do,” Anderson continues. “I don’t ask for anything specific from any of the musicians I work with—in fact, it’s really a fundamental work ethic of mine not to interfere in any way.

32 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

If we’re working together, that means I trust you and I’m confident that you will do the best you can do with your instrument.”

Compared to Embodiment’s unique take on metallic serialism, The Liminal Phase’s hushed melodicism and wall-of-sound harmoniousness seems like a different band altogether. There is a separation from the “Matrix Metal” tag Anderson imbued Sculptured with in the 2000s. “I didn’t use any serial techniques this time around,” Anderson explains. “I began using matrices for Embodiment because I wanted to force myself out of deeply ingrained patterns, melodies and chords.

Every instrumentalist struggles with this. You get used to doing the same licks and relying on the same chords for riffs.”

The Liminal Phase’s most striking quality lies within Sjøli’s voice, a more human example of singing compared to progressive metal’s superlative performances. “In the

beginning, Sculptured was a death metal band with some clean vocals,” Anderson says. “I knew I wanted clean vocals from the start because they are too dynamic and emotive to completely forgo if you are already writing melodic metal.

But I definitely didn’t want ‘metal’ vocals—I just wanted a regular voice.”

The Liminal Phase’s more straightforward approach and dense mix lend to a heavier and more metallic experience than Sculptured’s more progressive and rocking past. “I think we were just lucky with the guitar tones and Jason did a brilliant and meticulous job with the mix,” says Anderson of the album’s more aggressive sound. “I think bands can get too hung up on searching for a perfect tone. Tone comes from your hands first, and then your guitar and amp. I really believe you don’t need anything else. It’s about not getting in the way of the magic.” —JON ROSENTHAL

’s undead doom gets possessed by classic metal on their sixth LP, The Tritonus Bell

by SEAN FRASIER • photo by MIKKO SAASTAMOINEN

SE :E DLE C I B E L 34 : A PP R TI LE M 2 0B2E1R: 2D0E2C1I B

ombstones topple in a foggy cemetery. Skeletal hands slide

concrete casket lids aside. Then 24 minutes into Tombs of the Blind Dead—the Portuguese/Spanish zombie film from director Amando de Ossorio—the sinister stars emerge from the mist. The blood-lusting undead Knights Templar slow-motion gallop onto the screen, cloaks stained with centuries of coffin rot. The film inspired a series of movies that approached zombies with an ancient mystique, drenched in atmosphere so thick you could smell the tomb musk. ¶ When vocalist/guitarist Lasse Pyykkö first created his death/doom project Hooded Menace in 2007, the homage to the film was immediately identifiable. The first demo was entitled The Eyeless Horde, and the shrouded ghouls on the cover invite knowing comparison. He even used the pseudonym Leper of Berzano, a nod to the abandoned medieval town where the film’s horrors commence. While most coverage of the band focuses on this connection, Pyykkö admits that the film did not have an immediate death-clutch on his imagination.

“In fact, it wasn’t until [the] mid-2000s or so that I saw [the third film in the Blind Dead series] The Ghost Galleon,” Pyykkö reveals. “If these flicks were circulating in the underground metal scene back in early ’90s when me and [rhythm guitarist Teemu Hannonen] were still playing in Phlegethon, they didn’t reach us like some other horror stuff did.”

Pyykkö describes Finnish metalheads in Joensuu trading VHS copies of rare horror and splatter flicks, much like the tape-trading that helped spread extreme metal worldwide.

Hooded Menace’s visuals and atmosphere capture the ’70s and ’80s grit and grain of cigaretteburned grindhouse film reels. But no horror film had more of an impact on Pyykkö’s young mind than the sordid anthems by KISS and Los Angeles hellions W.A.S.P. “The debut album from W.A.S.P., along with Destroyer and Dressed to Kill by KISS, were my first LPs and got me hooked on heavy music in the first half of the ’80s,” Pyykkö recalls. “I remember driving with my dad when W.A.S.P.’s ‘I Wanna Be Somebody’ was playing on the radio, and I thought it was the best thing ever. I remember that moment of the song blasting from the radio, and how it thrilled me totally. I consider their debut LP a flawless album to this day.”

Despite their impact on Pyykkö, you’d be hard-pressed to find any influence from those albums throughout Hooded Menace’s cobwebbed discography. Their mournful pacing and graveyard growls seem centuries removed from the heyday of Motor City rock ‘n’ roll or Sunset Strip hair metal. But on Hooded Menace’s upcoming sixth LP, The Tritonus Bell, the band invites more influences from classic metal. Think Asphyx possessed by King Diamond’s Abigail.

“After the first couple of songs were written [for The Tritonus Bell], the direction of the album began to shape up with more ’80s heavy metal

vibes and a bit faster tempos incorporated,” Pyykkö explains. “[2015’s] Darkness Drips Forth was very funereal and slow, and as much as we liked the music, we didn’t enjoy playing those songs that much after all. So, I’m sure this experience made us want to pick up a slightly faster pace on [2018’s] Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed.

“I suppose my tendency to write slightly faster material just developed naturally because of all these experiences, plus my non-stop jams of ’80s heavy metal,” he continues. “It’s not like I’m bored with death and doom—hell, we are still playing death/doom, aren’t we?—but the fact is that most often I tend to pick up an older favorite of mine from the ’80s like Restless and Wild by Accept or The Ultimate Sin by Ozzy. That’s the stuff that is ingrained the deepest into my brain, and it feels totally natural to channel some of that into our music.”

Let’s make this clear, though: The Tritonus Bell is still a creeping nightmare. “Chime Diabolicus” conjures old-school death metal while synths weave necro dread. “Blood Ornaments” oozes through the catacombs when it’s not on the prowl with searing solos. Then there’s “Scattered Into Dark,” which embraces gothic horror with moonlit melodies. Vocalist Harri Kuokkanen is also in rare form, bringing dynamic range to the genre while maintaining that mystique of supernatural terror. But there’s a throwback pulse to Hooded Menace’s mummified tunes on this Season of Mist release, captured brilliantly by the album’s engineer—and King Diamond guitarist—Andy LaRocque.

“Once we figured we actually have some King Diamond influences on the new material, I remembered that Andy LaRocque has a studio,” says Pyykkö. “It was a great move because Andy was flexible and super-easy to work with, zero ego problems. Most importantly, he made us sound better than ever before. Of course, it was a little strange to work with someone you have looked up to since you were a kid, but he made everything easy.”

Despite being armed with a new album, Hooded Menace are in no rush to play the songs live. Those inclinations preceded the pandemic, and Pyykkö is completely open about preferring writing and recording new material over touring. Even as a fan, he’d rather listen to music peacefully at his own domicile than head to a live gig.

“Personally, I don’t feel the lust to play live at all, and I know some other guys in the band feel the same way,” Pyykkö shares, before offering a cliffhanger. “But never say never.”

I tend to pick up an older favorite of mine from the ’80s like Restless and Wild by Accept or The Ultimate Sin by Ozzy. That’s the stuff that is ingrained the deepest into my brain,

and it feels totally natural to channel some of that into our music.

DECIBE DLE C: ISBEEPLT:EAMPBREI R L 2021 : 35

interview by

QA j. bennett

WIT H

GEORGE DEAFHEAVEN’s vocalist on quarantine under armed guard, finding a new voice and the band’s non-metal new album 36 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

W

hen we meet George Clarke at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, armed guard and they keep you subdued with

it’s June 11, 2021. It’s our first in-person and unmasked interview since lockdown began over a year ago. The city is scheduled to fully reopen four days later. It feels a little weird, but we definitely don’t miss sucking down our own hot fumes while we’re trying to have a conversation. It’s also the Deafheaven vocalist’s first American interview for the band’s new album, Infinite Granite. They released the first single, a clean guitars/clean vocals shoegaze-pop jangle called “Great Mass of Color,” just two days before we meet up, and already the interhole is ablaze with such incisive commentary as, “Where are the screams?” (Even though it has a few screams at the end.) ¶ Luckily, Deafheaven are accustomed to confused reactions from confused reactionaries. But anyone who heard their last album, 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, and didn’t see this coming just wasn’t paying attention. That record showed the band moving away from the metalgaze sound they helped popularize while Clarke dipped his toe into clean vocals on a duet with Chelsea Wolfe. Infinite Granite is chock full of clean guitars and clean singing and pop song structures. In other words, the stuff Deafheaven were probably headed toward all along. “People can choose to be surprised by it or not, but it’s not a total 180,” our man concedes. “And it’s just songs. I have to say that.

We wanted to write some different songs.”

How has the pandemic been for you?

It’s been… OK. We had a seven-week tour booked to celebrate 10 years of being a band. It was supposed to start three weeks after everything shut down, so everything was cancelled. The whole year was wiped. We did the 10 Years Gone live thing, which was chaotic, and then we decided to do a record.

10 Years Gone wasn’t pre-planned, right? You did that because of the pandemic.

Right. We didn’t wanna let people down because they couldn’t see the show. In part, the record was made to service that want that our fanbase may have had. And also because we lost a ton of money. So, we just called Jack [Shirley] and asked if he could do it. This was at the height of the chaos, so flights were crazy and Chris [Johnson], our bass player, was flying in from Boston. He was on the plane with two masks, the studio was on extreme lockdown, and the whole thing was strange.

Then you started writing Infinite Granite.

We did it in secret, with everyone living in L.A. for a long period of time. And that was nice, because I got to retain some sense of normalcy and we were all together. So, we had kind of a beneficial pandemic in that way. It was bad, but it could have been so much worse. We were able to utilize the time and we were able to work with people who also had freed-up schedules, which PHOTO BY ED NE W TON

was really lucky. And when the record was done, I went to New Zealand.

More like escaped…

[Laughs] Yeah, I did escape. I know. And the thing is, everyone there thinks there’s bodies in the streets here in the U.S. Of course, at one point in New York, there was.

Until Cuomo made them disappear.

Yeah, yeah—exactly. [Laughs] But we made it out.

My girlfriend is a musician who lives here, but she’s from New Zealand and she had an opportunity to tour in her home country. I was lucky enough to sneak my way in. It was a good reprieve, and I worked on the artwork for the album.

Can we talk about how you were kept under armed guard in quarantine?

So, there was a mandatory 14-day quarantine when we got to New Zealand. We flew to Christchurch for quarantine, where everything was militarized. They put us on special buses with 18-year-old soldiers with submachine guns.

But it’s very different than the American military. They look bored half the time, and you almost feel like you can pat them on the back. I don’t know how much New Zealand is actively attacking or defending these days.

Not much of either, I’d guess.

Yeah. So, they stick us in a hotel room under

intense room service, which was OK. I had about 20 pounds of curry. I was sweating curry. And they kept bringing milk. There’s no interfacing, so all communication is done with notes, like paper under the door. I’d be like, “Please, no more milk.” It was like these messages in bottles that never arrived. But it was mostly OK. Apparently, I do well in hotels, just sitting around all day. I’ve been training for that for years, I guess.

Your new record is very different. I feel like there’s going to be this top layer of media coverage that talks about what a surprise it is, but it’s not really that much of a surprise, is it?

No. I think because of the type of band we are, that we do these weird pivots here and there, that regardless of how the story ends up, there will always be a breadcrumb trail to show you that there were signs the whole time. I’ve been talking about how much I like pop songwriting since Roads to Judah—and how difficult I find it to be compared to anything else. And while I think that Ordinary [Corrupt Human Love] was a revelation in a ton of ways—and a necessary bridge—reflecting on it now, you can see those ideas really trying to push through and having a hard time. Or the whole thing seeming disjointed because we’re occasionally ham-fisting these Britpop riffs into our songs.

In the middle of that touring cycle, we started talking about trying this. When the pandemic hit, we took it as an opportunity because it needed time. It wasn’t a rash thing. Not only had I not really sung melodically, but I hadn’t even written melodically. I’d never tried to write a chorus or something catchy—or had to completely change my lyrical approach to rhymes.

But I don’t think it’s super-surprising.

It’s your singing that will ultimately be the main talking point, because you played some of this type of non-metal shoegaze music on Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.

Right. I think if the music on this record was exactly the same, but I did my traditional singing over it, we wouldn’t have this pressure—even though the music would already be so different.

So, it’s the vocal. No one has really talked about the speed of the drums or the guitar tones. People just hear the singing. So, we knew if we were gonna do this, we had to give it some thought.

But it also sounds like us in a lot of ways.

Anyone who heard the last record and didn’t see this coming wasn’t paying attention.

When I was bringing up doubts, everyone else in the band was siding with you. Like, “relax.”

DECIBEL : SEP TEMBER 2021 : 37

Hard, not heavy  Deafheaven lighten up and Clarke (r) thinks you should, too

There’s a lot of nods to doo-wop on the record.

You’re right, though: The pressure ends up being on you, because the vocalist is almost always the person the audience feels most connected with. Because you’re not playing an instrument, they feel your contribution is the most personal.

Yes. There’s absolutely a personal connection there. In light of that, I really wanted to do it justice. It’s not a frivolous thing. We gave it our all. We replaced a lot of speed with density and layering and heightened production. We took more time with things and placed a lot more emphasis on drum tone. There’s a lot about the record that’s quite heavier than other stuff we’ve done, just because we had more space.

You did some clean singing on “Night People” on the last album. How crucial was that in laying the groundwork for this album?

It was, but only in the “If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it” kind of way. We’re that way with a lot of decisions. I just need to take the plunge— then I can sit back and think about it. So, singing clean on that song was just a “fuck it” decision. After we realized it worked—and no one raised too many eyebrows about it—I felt a bit more comfortable pursuing it. But I was almost shaking during the Ordinary session because I felt so naked. I’m more confident now.

Tell me about the process of finding your new voice.

It takes a long time. It took me a solid year. I had met Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who produced the record, through a series of cool coincidences. I brought up to him the idea of trying to sing, and he told me to give it eight months to a year to really work on it. So, that’s exactly what I did.

38 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Because nothing was going on during the pandemic, I would make playlists of different singers and just drive around L.A.—I put about 20 or 30,000 miles on my car—and emulate them to see what felt comfortable. Which ended up being this more robust voice that happens on some of the heavier tracks. And then, from there, I had to dial myself down even further for the shoegaze-type things, where I could almost kind of croon. So, it was all over the place. I listened to a lot of Pulp, Nina Simone and Chet Baker. There’s a lot of nods to doo-wop on the record. I wanted something that felt classic and comfortable.

Justin was super helpful. He’d let me go to his studio while he was working on other sessions and just go in an iso booth and be as loud as I wanted. There’s a heavy rock mid-range voice that happens at the end of some of these tracks that was hard to find without having a space where you can just yell.

When I first heard the album, I felt like it was almost two different people singing—especially on the first two songs.

Yeah, that was another thing. The only background I really have in clean, traditional singing is in theater. So, Justin said I should try to find characters for the different songs. The songs vary, so he said I should vary as well. So, those are the two primary characters on the record: The one that inhabits “Shellstar” and is also on “Lament for Wasps” and “Other Language,” and then you have the “In Blur” character which shows up on “Gnashing” and “Villain.” So, yeah—you’re right. And that’s purposeful.

Is there a lyrical theme?

The songs are kind of related, yeah. This goes

back to the pandemic, too. One thing that happened to me is that I got really bad insomnia.

I think it was because I was expending so little energy. I couldn’t go to the gym anymore. I would run outside, but I’m usually kind of a high -energy person, so I’d be up all night. I was going to bed at 7 a.m. constantly, so I was up at the blue hour—right before dawn—and I think that motif made it into almost every song. There’s a lot of fire and water as well. And I was doing a lot of research on my family prior to that, so there’s some of that as well. So, maybe not a theme, necessarily, but a mood: that cool and calm of the blue hour.

Are you still on the no-booze program?

Yeah. Three and a half years now. It feels great.

Experiencing the blue hour sober is much different than when you’ve stayed up all night, isn’t it?

[Laughs] One hundred percent. There’s no fear or anxiety about it. It used to be like, “The sky is blue—we gotta get home!” But now all that terror is removed. That’s actually another thing I should mention. Ordinary was written on the cusp of these things. Kerry [McCoy] and I had stopped partying halfway through the making of that album. This one felt more us. It felt fresh. I was explaining to a friend that Ordinary almost felt like Roads to Judah, where we were just trying things out and it was a little haphazard. We were confident, but not everything had been worked out. By the time we got to Sunbather, it was more of a solid idea. It was fully formed. That’s how this record feels, too—even though it’s sonically very different. It feels like a clearer statement.

This is what we are right now.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

Contents Under Pressure the making of Candiria’s 300 Percent Density

by

nick green

DBHOF201

CANDIRIA

300 Percent Density CENT URY MEDIA MAY 1, 2001

So thick and so quick

D E C I B E L : 41 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

PHOTO BY REGINALD JUSTE

IN

Greek mythology, the major deities of the pantheon possessed the ability to appear before mortals in many forms. But shapeshifting is a trait most closely associated with Proteus, son of the sea god Poseidon, whose name has come to define versatility in the English language and offers the perfect descriptor for progressive hardcore heroes Candiria: protean. The impossibly hard to define act had been mixing metallic hardcore with elements of free jazz/jazz fusion, hip-hop and ambient from the jump with their border-breaking debut, 1995’s Surrealistic Madness. Four albums into their fruitful and frenetic career, 2001’s 300 Percent Density simply presented Candiria’s most breathtaking expanse.

There’s a credible argument to be made that 300 Percent Density was actually the final chapter of an unofficial trilogy that opened with 1997’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt and continued on 1999’s The Process of Self-Development. These three albums are inextricably linked in the minds of most Candiria fans, and perhaps the band itself. Candiria clearly found the perfect mixture of combustible personalities with the “classic” era lineup of The Process of Self-Development, which marked the debuts of guitarist John LaMacchia and bassist Michael MacIvor. Following the release of 300 Percent Density, LaMacchia, MacIvor, vocalist Carley Coma, drummer Ken Schalk and guitarist Eric Matthews quickly returned to the studio to harness the energy of that lineup and re-record tracks from Beyond Reasonable Doubt.

The pulse of New York City is as palpable in the music of Candiria as any of the iconic NYC acts that preceded them.

Candiria knew that New York had way more to offer than just the Lower East Side, and believed that its music should be an expression of heterogeneity. This idea is captured in its ultimate form on “Constant Velocity Is as Natural as Being at Rest,” which melds Sun Ra-esque free jazz with hardcore breakdowns and Middle Eastern polyrhythms.

“Channeling Elements” offers an equally bruising mix of jazz-inflected metal. And when Coma pauses his guttural vocals to rock the mic and reference the band’s back catalog on “Without Water,” it’s with the same swagger that defined the New York Yankees championship teams of the late ’90s: “Coma’s comin’ through with service and a smile reaction / I told you on Beyond Reasonable / The first song was ‘Faction.’”

Candiria have always been—and remain—a favorite among the group’s peers, because musicians already possess the vocabulary to understand the intricacy of the band’s arrangements and the tireless care and craft that went into perfecting them. On 300 Percent Density—and the year-long touring cycle that followed the album’s May 2001 release—Candiria made great strides towards mass appeal without any musical compromises. Like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge, Candiria pressed hard to break through the monoculture of metal’s awkward transitional years and pave the way for similarly experimental bands. For this debt of honor, we welcome 300 Percent Density into our Hall of Fame.

DBHOF201

CANDIRIA 300 percent density

What do you remember about the writing process for 300 Percent Density? How were the songs assembled?

Although The Process of Self Development was the first record that I played on, it was recorded within the first year of me being in the band. So, I don’t think I was very confident in presenting or standing up for my ideas until it was time to write material for 300 Percent Density. Besides that, I remember that we would spend days—sometimes weeks—on nailing some of the more complex and technical aspects of certain parts. The process would probably drive a lot of musicians mental. But it’s simply what we did, because we felt we could always sound tighter or smoother or more fluid, depending on what the part called for.

KEN SCHALK: We began writing for the album in August 2000. We wrote and rehearsed as a band three times a week until the end of the year.

We hit the studio to record in January 2001. The only small break was when I spent Halloween week playing drums for the Misfits. The songs were assembled at the rehearsals, but we were all individually writing throughout the week on our own time. The section in “Contents Under Pressure” from 4:21-5:20 was written over the course of two weeks between my subway commute and then testing parts at home on keyboard and drums before showing the band. The entire rhythmic structure and musical outline for 2:37-2:59 in “The Obvious Destination” was also composed on train rides and then brought into rehearsals to be worked on with the band.

JOHN LAMACCHIA: I would say that it was one of the most challenging records for Carley because there was so much ground for him to cover. He’s an extremely talented vocalist, but looking back on it, he had to work hard to figure out what was right for the songs and navigate whether his vocals were going to be more emotive or more connected to the drums. My role was comparatively really easy, because the foundation of the music often started with the guitar. “Advancing Positions” and “Mass” were written in my house.

“Mass” was a piece of music I wrote for a woman that I was dating who was a dancer. Carley heard me working on it and told me it was perfect for the album. “Advancing Positions” had a similar genesis. Carley heard it and was inspired to write a little hip-hop passage, then Ken added some more elements in the studio.

CARLEY COMA: The writing process was intense.

We went over every guitar riff, every bassline, every drum part, and every lyric and syllable with a fine-tooth comb. From my perspective, there was a lot of math involved. I remember Kenny challenging me to write lyrics for a part in “The Obvious Destination.” It felt like I was writing vocals in a blender. I was beyond MICHAEL MACIVOR:

“After 9/11, I realized how much I was taking our city for granted. I think I only visited the Twin Towers once, and I was just in the lobby.

There’s a reason why people travel from all over the world to experience what we have here.

These days, I go out of my way to see what NYC has to offer.”

CA RLEY CO MA frustrated. I’m glad he pushed me, though. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the album for me. The songs were assembled, piece by piece, like sonic Legos. It was inspiring to watch these guys connect opposing genres of music with intricate transitions. The greater the obstacle, the more we wanted to conquer it.

Our mindset was fierce. It’s just how we rolled.

ERIC MATTHEWS: With Candiria, some albums may have been heavier on some people’s parts than others. There were more of my riffs in the early years of the band, and John’s riffs were more prominent in the later years. But when we got in the studio, we shaped each song together.

Making each part fit with transitions was a collaborative effort. So, everyone had a hand in it, even Carley. He doesn’t play guitar, but he would hum out a riff change to us and we would figure out how to translate that. It was a really interesting process when I think back on it, and this collection of songs is quite unique.

SEP TEMBER 2021 : 4 2 : DECIBEL

All of the early Candiria albums were recorded at Purple Light Studios in Brooklyn with producer Mike Barile, who is thanked in the liner notes for “being the 6th sense.” How much time did the band spend in the studio? Was it a well-oiled process by then?

Well, I would say that 85-90 percent of the music was ready to go. We were a wellrehearsed band. All we needed to do was get in there and track the guitars, drums and bass, and obviously Carley had to get his vocals down. If I remember correctly, the hip-hop song “Words From the Lexicon” was written in the studio, and the long ambient piece at the end—which is one of my favorite pieces of music on the album—was put together on the fly. We always left room to create a little magic in the studio, because we seemed to fare well with those conditions. Purple Light was also a really inspiring place to work. Mike Barile was a very creative guy and very open-minded.

LAMACCHIA:

SHIRTS

SHIRTS

E V I S U L C X E

P A T C H E S

NSORSH IP *S M IL E FO R CE

F L A G S BEANIES

DBHOF201

CANDIRIA 300 percent density

300 Percent Density was our fourth album with Mike Barile. By that time, our relationship with him had grown very tight. He definitely was “the 6th sense,” as he is credited on the album. There are countless occasions where his timely suggestions and ideas brought parts and songs to that next level. We went into Purple Light in January 2001 and spent a month tracking the album. We were definitely a well-oiled machine, but also needed the time to experiment and flesh out all the extra stuff that went into the sound of a Candiria album. Once all the tracking was done, we took a small break before mixing and mastering it. We were heading out with Cryptopsy and Poison the Well in midMarch to start the touring cycle, so the album had to be done before that.

MACIVOR: I honestly have no recollection of how much time we spent in the recording studio.

Could have been a month, could have been six weeks. But the recording budget provided by Century Media wasn’t a tremendous amount of money, so it was probably closer to one month rather than six weeks. I think that putting together records could be considered a smooth and efficient process for us at that point. John and I had been members of Candiria for a few years. Contributing to the songwriting was something that was newer for both of us, but we really understood the musical language of Candiria by then.

SCHALK:

Candiria already had a rep for being a visceral live act. Was playing live a way to stay sharp or to woodshed new material, or both? How much improvisation did you accommodate on any given night?

We played live because we loved it. We loved interacting with our fans. It gave us an opportunity to share our work on a deeper level.

To be honest, it was my main motivation for being in the band. I was always thinking how a song was going to translate live. Thinking about it now still gives me goosebumps. We would improvise when it made sense or when we’d mess up, trying to create happy accidents.

In the beginning of our career, I would freestyle an entire live set. At the time, it seemed like a pretty cool thing to do.

LAMACCHIA: “Mathematics” was around for about a year before Carley finished his vocals. We were playing it live before it was recorded. That was an example of a song where we were working out how it felt to play and exploring the nature of it. When we were writing stuff and Carley didn’t have anything ready, he would always improvise lyrics on the spot. He’d get on stage and play around with subject matter. It didn’t occur a lot, but there were moments where things like that happened. “Signs of Discontent” is another song COMA:

that we were playing live before it got recorded.

But that wasn’t the usual pattern for us. If we were touring, we were performing a tight set.

And if we were off the road, we were trying to write and record.

SCHALK: We’d definitely played some songs prior to their album version in live shows, but for the most part, touring and live shows represented the performance side of our band. We played live because we loved getting onstage and tearing it up. I personally left areas in all of our songs for improvising—or more accurately, Zen-like interpretation. As time went on and we played the songs more and more, I’d solidify more areas that had once been open for interpretation. At the end of our sets, Carley would walk off and leave us to jam freely. That was all spontaneous improvisation.

MACIVOR: Not many musicians, particularly in metal, start playing because they have aspirations to live in a recording studio. Recording is fun and I enjoy it very much. But playing live has always been the best part of being in a band for me. It wasn’t very often that we would use the live setting to try out new material. It would happen here and there. But it was usually just a riff or two, not much more than that. We almost always began our sets with improvised music when we had the luxury of doing so. I would say we did that with almost every headlining set. It was harder when we were on a support tour and were lower on the totem pole. That’s when you have to just deliver your best 20-30-minute set.

And on a metal package tour, that means just playing as much heavy material as you can cram into your allotted time.

All of the band members lived and rehearsed and recorded in New York City. How important was that environment in cultivating the sound of Candiria? How did your relationship with that environment change after 9/11?

We didn’t just hang out in Brooklyn.

We played and spent time in every borough.

That played a huge role in the way we consumed music and how it inspired the music we made. Music was everything for me. I lived in the same apartment as Eric, and Ken lived two doors down. I had a makeshift eight-track studio and Ken had the same set-up. We were constantly recording and trading tapes and writing that way. We lived on Flatbush Avenue and our houses were sort of the central location for where we all met up and hung out and partied and created things. We were all deeply involved in each other’s lives and enmeshed in what was happening in New York City. Everything had an impact—we’d go to an Indian restaurant and hear tabla and sitar players and get thinking about complex rhythms. We’d walk down the street and cars would be blasting hip-hop.

Listening to saxophone players practicing scales in subway stations—to me, that’s the most pure

LAMACCHIA:

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New York experience. It’s hard not to be inspired by what you hear every single day in the city.

COMA: There wouldn’t be a Candiria “sound” without New York City. Our roots run deep. We couldn’t help being inspired by the different cultures, food, people, backgrounds, street lingo, crews, etc. The NYC way of life permeated our style of writing. When I listened to our records, it would make me feel like I was riding the train from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. After 9/11, I realized how much I was taking our city for granted. I think I only visited the Twin Towers once, and I was just in the lobby. There’s a reason why people travel from all over the world to experience what we have here.

These days, I go out of my way to see what NYC has to offer. Home is where the pizza is.

SCHALK: New York is an international city for music and culture. Sharing all of our influences gave us the inspiration and motivation to be more experimental with our songs. That allowed us to create the sound we wound up calling “urban fusion,” which was really the unrestricted permission to introduce ideas that come from any culture or genre of music. We were inspired by the sounds and rhythm of life itself.

Everything had a potential chance to make its way into a Candiria song.

MATTHEWS: Hanging out on the streets together definitely gives you a certain type of inspiration, and you can hear how that mix emerged in Candiria’s music over the years. As far as 9/11, I suppose it just made me more proud to be a New Yorker, as we remarkably bounced back as a city from such a horrible event.

MACIVOR: I think that being from NYC was very important to the development of the Candiria sound. I’ve said before that I do not think that Candiria could have come from any other place in the world. And I stand by that statement to this day. New York City is the crossroads of the world. And the music of NYC has always been as ethnically and stylistically diverse as all of the inhabitants of the city. I don’t think that 9/11 had much impact on the band’s music. It may have had an impact on each of us as individuals.

It would be odd to think that something that significant wouldn’t. But perhaps what it did help was to remind us that everything you take for granted can be gone in a moment. So, if you have any desire to do something, do it now. Tomorrow is not promised to anyone.

Do you have a favorite song on the album, and why?

My favorite song is the title track, “300 Percent Density.” It was one of my favorite songs to perform live. My energy level would go through the roof as soon as I heard the opening riff. I was compelled to move.

LAMACCHIA: I’m going to go with “Signs of Discontent.” I think it’s a standout track for me. It was the first time Candiria had done COMA:

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CANDIRIA 300 percent density

anything different with guitar tuning. I wrote a great deal of it in my apartment. Ken wrote his parts in his apartment. That was one of the first times we attempted to write a Candiria song together like that. We ended up making a 2.0 version of the song with Mike, and that’s the version on the album. I love that version of it, and I loved the version before it, too. It’s a really beautiful piece of music and Carley definitely came through in a big way with his parts.

MATTHEWS: My favorite is “Contents Under Pressure.” I love John’s guitar sound right from the beginning. Then about two and a half minutes in, we get that awesome double bass with the spacing in the guitar riff to highlight it. At around the 4:00 mark, Kenny comes in with that sick ride cymbal beat. And then towards the end,

I really loved John, Kenny and Mike’s fusion jazz run that leads right into the ending riff that I wrote. It brings down the house for sure. It’s a pretty cool song.

MACIVOR: I’m going to have to pick “Contents Under Pressure.” I think that song has a little bit of everything that Candiria tried to accomplish and incorporate over the years. It also is one of the most technically complex and demanding songs we ever wrote. It has some of those “work on a part for weeks to get it right” sections. Also, the first minute and a half of the song is some of my favorite music of Candiria that we ever attempted.

SCHALK: “Contents Under Pressure.” After releasing The Process of Self-Development, we knew the level of musicianship for 300 Percent Density had to top it. In the effort to shorten the average length of our heavy songs, “Contents Under Pressure” wound up crushing that idea

and became the epic track at six and a half minutes. It’s got so many parts in it that it really pushed us as writers and players. And that ending riff from Eric just crushes. I actually added a layer of piano chords in unison with the open accents of the ending guitar riff.

If you listen closely, the accents at 5:42 are the first ones you hear it on, and it goes to the end from there. Every time it happens, I get this little extra nudge of nostalgia. “Contents Under Pressure” was one of the last songs we had ready before going to the studio. When I listen to it, I think back to all the work we put into that song to get it right. The depth of the song, the time to write and rehearse it, because of the level we wanted it to be at, brought us all the way to the wire.

The album’s closing track “Opposing Meter” is followed by an untitled ambient song, separated by three minutes of silence. Were these written as and intended to be companion pieces?

No, not at all. There was no intention for that. We knew “Opposing Meter” would wind up on the record. Ken wrote it, and Carley and I heard it and really liked it. I think we wanted to do something with the piece of music that became the hidden track, but the decision to include it came much later in the process. It might’ve even happened while we were mastering the record. I don’t remember a moment where the band came together and plotted that out specifically. Candiria really thrived in the CD era. We were insistent at packing content in. In hindsight, I regret that somewhat. That’s one of the reasons that it took 20 years for 300 Percent Density to come out on vinyl—it has to be a double LP and that’s extremely expensive to press. For me, personally, I’m good with an album that’s 45-50 minutes, tops.

That’s what I love about What Doesn’t Kill You...

But that’s not what Candiria was about back then; we were committed to providing these long and intense experiences.

SCHALK: “Opposing Meter” is actually just the electronic song that ends at 5:30. The other music is the “secret track” separated by the few minutes of silence. This was a thing bands would do at the time with CDs. Because the disc could house up to almost 75 minutes of music, bands would sometimes add B-sides or a “secret track” after the album sequence was complete. We initially had no intention for a secret track until… one night at the studio near the end of January, John was jamming some guitar over a loop. We decided to record it with me playing conga.

After that, for ambiance, Mike Barile stuck a condenser mic out of the office window to record late-night traffic. He also hung a mic over the control room door while a few people were hanging out talking in the office. Once we realized how cool it was, we decided to sneak it in at the end of the CD as a secret track.

LAMACCHIA:

“There was this one guy who was really angry about Candiria and kept giving the middle finger to Carley every time he came over to my corner of the stage. I fucking lost it. I was so angry that I tried to grab him and choke the life out of him, even though he was twice my size.”

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Is there a story behind the album’s title?

Beats the shit out of a Haulix link  A promotional poster, cassingle and CD single promoting the release of 300 Percent Density

I’m pretty certain that it’s a term used in printing. We didn’t have a title and Ken was in the process of making the art. He brought his Mac into the studio. When he finished tracking drums, he was in Studio B working on the artwork and putting it all together. He was showing us some of his ideas for the album art and he came across the term. I think it was a situation where Carley asked what it meant and Ken explained it, and Carley was like, “Dude, that’s a dope album title.” That’s how it went down.

SCHALK: The title is a metaphorical reference to ink coverage on paper during the printing process. “Maximum density” was a term used for total ink coverage on print jobs; 300 percent maximum density is the amount of total ink coverage you can have on paper from the fourcolor printing process before risking the ink not drying in a timely fashion and thus smudging or blotching. The title implies that we basically soaked the songs with as much sound as we could without risking it being too much. This album is sonically dense and saturated to its maximum point before becoming so dense it gets smudged or blotched like wet ink.

LAMACCHIA:

300 Percent Density coincided with the band’s heaviest period of touring, with 120+ shows between 2001-2002. This included dates with Cryptopsy and Nasum in Japan, a long run opening for Six Feet Under on the Metallenium Tour, and dates in Canada, the U.K. and Europe.

Do you have any memorable experiences to share from this run?

MACIVOR: 300 Percent Density provided the band with many of our firsts. It was the first time we toured heavily. It was the first time we made it to Europe and Japan and all of Canada. It was the first time that we made a video. It was also the first time that quite a few musicians that we idolized growing up started taking notice of our band. Members of Suicidal Tendencies, Fishbone and Metallica all started coming out to see us play. That was a mind-blowing thing to me. It made me say to myself, “I guess we are supposed to be doing this.” Being a touring musician, you give up a sense of normalcy and you make a lot of sacrifices. I think that during this time period, I finally felt like all of the sacrifice was worth it.

MATTHEWS: We played Japan’s Yokohama Arena with Slayer and Pantera in front of over 10,000 people, and my son was born in New York after the show. When I heard the news, I ran down to the hotel lobby in the middle of the night with a bottle of wine to celebrate, and the German band Caliban was hanging out. I shared the news and we bonded over the bottle of wine, and they taught me some German as we celebrated. It was a memorable night for sure. We also picked up

some interesting nicknames during that era.

Our faithful road manager Kevin McCormick got the alias “Lar.” Carley was better known as “CB,” “Bizzle” and “Malone.” Mike was definitely “Uncle Frank,” sometimes just shortened to “U.F.” John had always been “Bebop,” but he gained the nickname “Johnny Touch” over the years. I was “E-loe,” which quickly got shortened to “Loe,” and Kenny was “Shank” or “Barrington Radcliffe,” a name given to him for his great love of reggae drummers.

COMA: Well, there was the time when Randy Blythe from Lamb of God thought my real name was “Archibald.” This went on for a while. I don’t remember how that came about. I may be wrong, but I think Mike had something to do with it. There was another time when I woke up duct-taped to my seat in the van. Once again, I’m pretty sure Mike was the ringleader.

SCHALK: The entire touring cycle for 300 Percent Density was amazing, but the highlight would have to be the three weeks we did in May 2001 with Soul Brains, the reunited members of Bad Brains. The Clutch/Biohazard tour in the fall/ winter was also an amazing run. And I can’t forget flying to Japan for the first time in August 2001 to play the Beast Feast. One month later, after 9/11, we’d be on a plane to Japan again for the dates with Cryptopsy and Nasum, except SEP TEMBER 2021 : 4 8 : DECIBEL

with everyone afraid to fly, we literally had almost an entire 747 all to ourselves. That was a pretty surreal—but insanely relaxing—flight.

LAMACCHIA: The Metallenium Tour was Six Feet Under, God Forbid, Darkest Hour, Lamb of God and us. This was right after 9/11, and all of the bands from Europe that were supposed to be on the tour couldn’t come over. We had a really difficult time with that crowd. We were the main support for Six Feet Under and we were not wellreceived. At the halfway point for that tour, we played the Key Club in Los Angeles in front of a huge crowd. But there was this one guy who was really angry about Candiria and kept giving the middle finger to Carley every time he came over to my corner of the stage. I saw this dude doing it and I stared at him, and he just shrugged. I fucking lost it. I was so angry that I tried to grab him and choke the life out of him, even though he was twice my size. He took a step backwards and I fell off the stage. I landed on my right leg.

I had just had surgery to have a titanium rod removed from that leg, which I had injured in a car accident. As soon as I hit the ground, Aaron Turner from Isis scooped me up and pushed me towards the front of the stage. My leg was badly injured again, and I was in agonizing pain. It didn’t end well for the fan. Carley and Eric both jumped off the stage. Carley punched the fan

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“300 percent maximum density is the amount of total ink coverage you can have on paper from the four-color printing process before risking the ink not drying in a timely fashion… we basically soaked the songs with as much sound as we could without risking it being too much.”

K E N SCHA LK right in his face, then the bouncers dragged the guy out of the venue. It didn’t end well for me, either. I was on crutches for the next two weeks and had to play the next five shows sitting down.

In hindsight, is there anything that you would change about this album? How do you view the significance of 300 Percent Density?

Nope. Each album is the music that came out of us for that period, I wouldn’t change anything. That’s how creating albums goes: You’re given a certain amount of time to create them from the record label, and whatever comes out of you comes out of you. If we’re asking hypothetically and I had 10 years to work on each album, of course there are parts we could have done better, but under the circumstances I just mentioned above, that’s what emerged. I’m just proud of the musicianship and that we created something special with 300 Percent Density.

Not perfect, but special.

COMA: I wouldn’t change a thing. It was a snapshot in time, and we allowed the moment to speak for itself. I didn’t realize how significant the record was until years later. You have to understand, experimenting and finding new ways to push the boundaries came naturally to us. I don’t think about breathing or how many times my heart pumps during the day. I just let it happen. Years later, people were still coming up MATTHEWS:

to me to let me know how important that record was to them. I decided to go back and listen to it recently as a fan. Not only was I in awe of what we created, but I was extremely proud of the guys I created it with. Much respect.

SCHALK: No. Looking back, 300 Percent Density was my favorite Candiria album to make and is still my favorite to listen to. All of our albums were an adventure and a blast to be a part of, but this album, to me, truly defines the most potent and powerful sound the band was able to create.

I think 300 Percent Density was a monumental album for the time. Bands were pushing on the basic formulas of metal and hardcore already.

We just joined that part of the movement instead of taking the more generic route. We took it to as extreme a place of creativity as we could. 300 Percent Density was absolutely the pinnacle of our inspiration and motivation to do so.

LAMACCHIA: The one regret I have about 300 Percent Density is that I wish we had recorded the guitar a little differently. Tracking the guitars was really hard. It was like four performances stacked on top of each other. I was in a room with two amplifiers blasting at max volume and trying to hear the recording in a pair of headphones. Later, we’d put the head of the amplifier into the control room and you could sit and listen to the actual mix there. I bring this up because the guitars are a little “loose” sounding SEP TEMBER 2021 : 50 : DECIBEL

when I listen back to it. What I’ve come to appreciate is that the guitars sound way more dense, in line with the record’s title. I would also change the artwork. It never popped on paper the way we hoped it would. When you looked at it on a computer screen, it looked different. The covers for Beyond Reasonable Doubt and The Process of Self-Development were very vibrant. This was intended to be just as vibrant; it just didn’t print that way. Looking at the big picture, though, it’s a really cool record and people have always been enthusiastic about it.

MACIVOR: I would definitely change the artwork. I think that the music deserves a better visual representation than it was given. I’ll leave it at that.

I’m sure if I went back and listened to the album as a whole, I could find many things that I would change about the music. But that would be nitpicking. I think it was a very significant album.

At the time, there were still plenty of people who were confused about our blending of styles. But 20 years later, no band has yet to sound like what we were doing on 300 Percent Density. Many of our peers, as well as younger generations of musicians, have told us what that album has meant to them. So, I think that we were able to put forth a great sonic representation of a band that was wildly adventurous and had very little regard for trends. And that is something that I am still quite proud of to this day.

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SINNER H A of an

5 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 1 : D E C I B E L

ER HANDS ANGRY GOD in the

Kristin Hayter reinvents the world of extreme music with

LINGUA IGNOTA’s

Sinner Get Ready

story by photos by JUSTIN M. NORTON JASON BLAKE

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LINGUA IGNOTA

You contribute nothing to your salvation

EXCEPT THE SIN THAT MADE IT NECESSARY.

K

JONATHAN EDWARDS

ristin Hayter started receiving digital messages not long

after the release of her breakthrough album Caligula in 2019.

One woman wrote saying she was stabbed three times by her boyfriend and that Lingua Ignota’s music helped her cope with rage. LGBTQ+ listeners wrote and said the music allowed them to process anger towards their families. Hayter even heard from men who said the music led them to reconsider past actions. “It’s an amazing honor, but this is something I’m completely unprepared to take on,” Hayter says from her home in rural Pennsylvania. “I try to be strong enough to be there. I have an enormous amount of respect for the people who are brave enough to reach out to me, and I try as best as I can to listen to their stories because I think they’ve earned that respect.” ¶ A few situations turned dark. One man wrote and said his cousin was raped and committed suicide. When the man’s tone grew obsessive and Hayter tried to remove herself from the conversation, the man threatened to kill Hayter and then himself. “I think a lot of people see me as a beacon for suffering, and some people see me as a beacon of feminism,” Hayter, 35, says. “I don’t think I am, and I don’t think the work is political. It’s more about recontextualizing misogyny. But it’s difficult to retain your sense of personhood when you attract so much suffering.”

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Hayter’s life changed even more during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the run-up to her third album, Sinner Get Ready. First, she suffered a severe disc herniation that caused around-theclock pain for six months. But getting an MRI scheduled was a challenge with hospitals flooded with COVID-19 cases. In addition, Hayter has no health insurance and needed to raise money for the operation. The pandemic also made touring impossible and left Hayter wondering if she could pay bills, never mind arrange a potentially life-altering surgery. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she had to extract herself from another toxic relationship—this time with a sexaddicted partner who repeatedly cheated on her.

“I felt that this was a consequence of my behavior and the life I live and for being cruel to my body,” Hayter says. “It was almost like the will of God. At any second, I thought my back and lower body would be gone forever. I was trying to navigate my relationship, finding a new place in the pandemic and all of the civil unrest and injustice. We were collectively traumatized, and I was trying to deal with this specific trauma.”

In some ways, Hayter has become a Miss Lonelyhearts for a digital generation that collectively processes grief through digital means like tweets, Instagram posts and TikTok video clips.

In Nathanael West’s novel, written during the Great Depression, a romantic advice columnist known only as Miss Lonelyhearts becomes overwhelmed with the suffering shared by readers.

Rather than cultivating a healthy distance from his subjects, he shoulders the suffering until it causes him to unravel. Similarly, Hayter has internalized the collective grief of the #metoo generation and, as a result, has trouble coping.

“I know she’s very grateful for the ability to connect with so many people, but I’m sure it can be exhausting,” says Hayter’s friend Dylan Walker of Full of Hell, who collaborated with her on the Sightless Pit project. “Trauma is a common thread across most people’s lives. I think her perspective is an underrepresented one, and themes of retribution are very empowering.”

While Caligula is on a larger level about victims getting revenge on their tormentors—on victimization leading to empowerment rather than retreat—Sinner Get Ready reflects on problematic behaviors and patterns that allow people to remain stuck in the same place.

Hayter said the album forced her to consider her poor choices, including the decision to move to central Pennsylvania to be with a duplicitous partner. “The fundamental aspect of the project is that it has to be 100 percent authentic,” Hayter says. “I wanted to expand on the world I’ve been building, but I didn’t want to use devices that feel like tricks now. Caligula was happening around me, and this record is much more solitary. It doesn’t use a lot of tricks or jumps between genres or dynamic ranges. I wanted to focus on the present.”

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LINGUA IGNOTA As a result, Sinner Get Ready is a markedly different work than Caligula. While Caligula openly dabbled with metal and even industrial sounds, not to mention liturgical music, Sinner Get Ready instead mines vintage Americana for its backbone. “Pennsylvania Furnace” is minimalist yet expansive, while “Man Is Like a Spring Flower” sounds like an old-time spiritual. Hayter continues her brilliant use of samples (she repurposed female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in her earliest music) on “The Sacred Liniment of Judgment,” which samples ’80s evangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s public apology for a tryst with a prostitute. Hayter howls, “Just kill him! You have to!” like a Greek tragedy chorus of one on “I Who Bend the Tall Grasses.” The unifying factor in every song is Hayter’s voice, both terrifying and majestic; at times light and buoyant and beautiful enough to lift the darkest medieval church; at times harrowing enough to sound like existential misery in a mental hospital or prison.

Hayter’s manager Cathy Pellow, who runs Sargent House records, first saw Lingua Ignota opening for Daughters at the Echo in Los Angeles. She said she knew she needed to work with Hayter 90 seconds into that performance.

“A wave of emotion came over me,” Pellow says.

“It was as if it was a divine message, a voice whispering to me, you must be involved with this artist. It was that immediate. I went up to her right after she played and said, ‘You and I need to be together; I want to help you, you are amazing,’ and that was the beginning of our relationship. I started as her manager and then later went on to become her label, too.

“Kristin says the quiet parts out loud,” Pellow adds. “She speaks her truth so clearly and courageously that it becomes the voice for so many people that may not be able to do so themselves.

She walks on the razor’s edge of all our humanity. I liken watching her live show to drinking ayahuasca. It is cathartic, and it forces us to confront emotions we keep buried. I’ve watched her move full rooms to tears.”

Hayter’s friends and collaborators are not surprised by the response to her music—or her decision to do a stylistic about-face after two albums. But, at the same time, they worry about her physical performance style; she suffered a concussion during a Roadburn show in 2019. “I begged [Kristin] to care for herself,” Pellow says, “and have encouraged her to seek ways in which she can go forward performing without needing to put her own life and health in harm’s way.”

Although Sinner delves more into American religions than Hayter’s Roman Catholicism, moments remain that will remind listeners of a Passion Play in Catholic church on Good Friday.

Just like listeners who suffer from trauma can find themselves in Hayter’s music, so can people who grew up surrounded by asphyxiating faith.

“Kristin is the only artist I’ve worked with that I’ve related to on a religious level,” says Profound Lore label head Chris Bruni, who released both SEPTEMBER 5 6 : J U:LY 2 0 2 1 : D E C2021 I B E L: DECIBEL

2017’s All Bitches Die (as a reissue a year later) and Caligula. “The religious and spiritual iconography and symbolism in her work are very strong. I went to a Catholic elementary and high school and was forced to go to church on many occasions.

I know religion also played a role in Kristin’s upbringing. We can still appreciate the power and resonance of religious aestheticism, iconography, artwork, architecture and structure.”

A lot of people see me as a beacon for suffering, and some people see me as a beacon of feminism.

I don’t think I am, and I don’t think the work is political.

It’s more about recontextualizing misogyny. But it’s difficult to retain your sense of personhood when you attract so much suffering.

KRISTIN HAYTER Bruni says calling the response to Caligula in 2019 “overwhelming” would be underselling it. “I knew we had something special and grand on our hands, but with any release, I try to keep expectations levelheaded,” Bruni says. “When I reissued and gave All Bitches Die a proper widespread release, we exceeded in taking that first step in bringing more awareness to Kristin’s music and

message. With Caligula, I gave Kristin full rein to materialize her vision for it, with no limits or compromises on budget or resources. It was one of the most intense, violent, religious, vengeful and confrontational Profound Lore releases.”

Laurie Shanaman, the vocalist of Ails and the breakthrough USBM band Ludicra, first heard All Bitches Die three years ago. She sought out the album after reading a review that compared Hayter to Diamanda Galás. “It’s a lot to take in, but it moves me for sure,” Shanaman says. “I do need to be in the right mood for this level of intensity. What moves me the most is her raw and vulnerable ability to go there, to that place that can often be scary. I think it speaks to a lot of women who’ve faced abuse and trauma.

“I’ve personally struggled with years of selfdoubt, self-neglect, managing depression and anxiety/panic attack disorder, and have had my share of trauma,” Shanaman adds. “Sadly, it’s a pretty common thing, yet the stigma towards it all is still disappointing. Her music is uncomfortable to the listener, and I sometimes imagine for her, too. I think Lingua Ignota resonates with the metal community because of the raw energy and emotion she exudes. She exposes her fragility and self-harm, yet also holds on—strong and enduring. These are the things that will always cross over for a more open-minded metal audience.”

No one is more surprised about the acceptance and embrace of Caligula—or the inordinate amount of attention her third album is receiving before it is even available—than Kristin Hayter.

“I have no idea how any of this happened,” she says. “With Caligula, I wanted to create something no one had heard before, and also work within the mythos I’d been creating to build something that was like an epic cycle. When it came out, I just had no idea it would take off in the way it did. I had no idea anyone would remotely give a shit about what I did. Everything just took on a life of its own.”

CHAPTER 1:

SAN DIEGO

Hayter grew up in a strict Catholic family in San Diego, and attended parochial schools until the sixth grade. She felt out of place in a community where most families were Portuguese. She once almost passed out from the overwhelming odor of incense in church, and was terrorized by a nearly six-foot-tall nun. “She was so nasty,” Hayter says. “One time, she came up behind me and dug her nails into my shoulders and just launched me into the wall because she thought I was yelling at another kid. She was always telling me I was a bad kid and that I would end up in the doghouse with other bad kids. The kind of shit they said was just bananas.”

While many of her memories of Catholicism involve physical abuse, screaming and terror, Hayter said something about the ritual and process of the faith was comforting. She went to mass every Monday, Wednesday and Friday,

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LINGUA IGNOTA and again on Sunday with her family. “That world is very stifling and suffocating,” she says.

“It was such a contrast to living in San Diego, sunny and idyllic and almost a resort town. I didn’t really feel at home there during my childhood. I was lucky to have my mom present and supportive parents. We never had a lot of money, but they always had my back.”

Music became a pillar of Hayter’s life. She loved to sing and started singing at home when she was 5 years old. When she was 9, her secondgrade class held an audition for a Christmas production. Hayter wanted to sing part of the Christian hymn “The Friendly Beasts.” Her voice made the other kids laugh. The adults in the room who knew better turned their heads when they heard her high soprano and noticeable vibrato. “The teacher noticed, and soon I was singing in choir and singing solos,” Hayter says.

“People in the congregation wanted me to sing more often, and I started cantering.”

Hayter started classical music training when she was 11. She wanted to attend a conservatory and become a professional vocalist. Her voice teacher insisted that Hayter also study piano. “It was a smart move because you don’t rely on your voice, and you can learn music notation. But I wasn’t a great pianist,” Hayter says. She also picked up the guitar at home. “Kristin would sit alone on our dining room table singing Phantom of the Opera to herself,” says Hayter’s mother, Mary Jane Hayter. “There has always been something powerful and moving in her voice.

“As a child, she sang ‘Amazing Grace’ a cappella, which had a powerful emotional impact on her audience,” Mary Jane continues. “Although she was the lead in a youth production of Dido and Aeneas [an opera by Henry Purcell], Kristin was never really drawn to musical theater.

Because she trained in classical music, Kristin skipped over the current pop music and became more interested in complicated and intense genres of music.

“Kristin was very sweet and gentle,” her mother adds. “She was shy around other people and always showed an unusual amount of empathy for others. We never witnessed Kristin doing or saying anything mean to other children, a truly beautiful soul then and now, although perhaps an old soul. It was clear early on that she was very gifted in several areas, including music, and was intellectually three to four years above her age group. Surprisingly enough, considering her interests now, Kristin did not enjoy loud sounds and would clap her hands over her ears if classmates started screaming or getting loud.”

Hayter grew interested in contemporary and alternative music after an older cousin left a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind at her house. Hayter was soon obsessed with Kurt Cobain. “I’d never heard anything like it, and my parents were just terrified,” she says. “They said I couldn’t listen to it. I tried to buy In Utero, and my mom refused because of the song ‘Rape Me.’” : SEPTEMBER 5 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 1 : D E C2021 I B E L: DECIBEL

After Nirvana, Hayter picked up more grunge music and eventually worked her way to bands like Sonic Youth, free jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman, and even local extreme bands like the Locust. She also transferred out of parochial school and attended public Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, graduating in 2004. Hayter found more freedom and expressive individualism once liberated from Catholic school. “I started to dress in ostentatious ways,” she says. “It’s super embarrassing to look back at it now. Coming from the stringent confines of Catholicism to different rules was a huge adjustment.”

Hayter developed an eating disorder when she was 11, which she attributes to stress and her feelings that she didn’t belong in sunny, utopian California. At one point, her weight dropped to roughly 70 pounds. “Throughout my life, there was this ongoing need to find a home somewhere,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t belong.

I was in a place where everyone was thin and beautiful, and I was not that. I had extreme perfectionist tendencies in all areas of my life and tried to excel.”

CHAPTER 2:

CHICAGO

When the time came to leave home, Hayter decided a conservatory wasn’t for her. She instead attended the Art Institute of Chicago on a painting scholarship. “The process for auditioning for a conservatory is so involved and seemed daunting at the time, so I decided I’ll probably not be able to do these things now,” Hayter says. “I’ll do what is available to me.”

Hayter adopted an interdisciplinary approach to her studies even at a young age, including sound, music, writing and performance art in her work. Hayter says her college training and classes were invaluable. She didn’t just think about making things; she thought about why she wanted to make them. “They didn’t teach you much about executing your craft,” Hayter says. “It’s not about all this hands-on experience with ceramics—although there are people who worked to master their craft. What they taught me was how to think about making art. The instructors constantly asked why. Why are you making these decisions? Why is this thing placed here as opposed to over there? That stuck with me and threw me for a loop.”

While Hayter was developing the creative fearlessness that became her calling card, her eating issues progressively got worse. At one point, she switched between bulimia and anorexia. “It was completely miserable—I couldn’t hold a job or relationship down,” Hayter says. “All I did was starve myself and exercise for maybe seven hours a day.”

Hayter’s life after her graduation in 2008 was nomadic. She lived in several locations and returned to live at home repeatedly. At one point, she moved to Oakland to attend graduate school for writing at Mills College. She dropped

out after six months. By her mid-20s, her eating disorder had worsened to the point that she could not lose weight no matter what she did— even through extreme measures like starvation or obsessive workouts. What ultimately got her well wasn’t the hospitalizations or therapy, but instead getting incredibly tired of being sick.

“It’s like I was terrified of being well or eating the scraps of a meal,” Hayter says. “I fought any recovery, but by the time I was about 25, I was so burned out and so exhausted that I just slowly started getting well on my own. I thought that maybe if I would exercise for only three hours, I wouldn’t get fat. I tried to see how it felt to ease back on these very intense limitations I put on myself. Eventually, there was a degree of normalcy I hadn’t experienced in my whole life—there was time to do things, time to make artwork, go to school or have a job. So many professionals told me I was going to die that month or that week. But it eventually felt like I could die and not reach my goal weight, which is so twisted to think about now.”

Soon after, when she moved back to Chicago from Oakland, Hayter met her abuser in June 2011. He was with her when they moved back and forth from Chicago to San Diego several times, and eventually when they moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 2014.

CHAPTER 3:

PROVIDENCE

Hayter applied to Brown’s lauded experimental writing program three times before she was accepted. She chose Brown because she knew it was the place where she could explore her art fearlessly. While Brown offered seemingly limitless artistic freedom, the reality of her home life left her trapped and isolated. “It was so much the focus of my attention that I didn’t have any time to think about artwork,” Hayter says. “When I did get to school, it was challenging to even go to class. If I was five minutes late leaving a class, I’d be punished. If I wanted to go to a performance by a colleague or a classmate, I wasn’t allowed to go. I didn’t talk to almost anyone in the program for about two years.

I felt like a ghost.”

Hayter says the physical and psychological abuse was unrelenting. “I remember being shoved in the middle of the street, being chased down stairs,” she says. “I remember trying to escape and him holding me in the seat of the car telling me I needed to come back upstairs.

I remember him crushing the car keys in my hand until they bled. There’s almost too much to describe—it was constant.”

Hayter’s abuser was arrested for simple domestic assault in Providence in 2015. A no-contact rule was put in place, and her abuser served jail time. However, Hayter took her abuser back several times until she finally had enough and told him he had to leave. “I told him the relationship destroyed me and my life,” she says.

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LINGUA IGNOTA “I locked myself in the bathroom and threatened to call the cops. He got his stuff and left. I haven’t heard from him since, even though I’ve been expecting to.”

The genesis of Lingua Ignota (a name for a sacred Christian language created by the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen) began in Hayter’s graduate program. Hayter wanted to examine the misogynistic tropes that govern subcultures like heavy metal and draw ties to virulent sexism in the culture at large. She collected primitive lyrics from bands like the Meat Shits (an early pornogrind band with songs like “Fag Killer” and “She Never Says No”), messageboard posts, and even text messages and voicemails from her abuser. She put all the text through a Markov chain model (in layman’s terms: an algorithm that can generate text when fed examples) to generate a crude compendium of sexism. The resulting text was 10,000 pages long—a length Hayter says was not an accident. “I wanted to create this contrast between low culture misogyny and high culture misogyny,” Hayter says. “Ten thousand pages of paper is roughly my body weight of 100 pounds, and I wanted that much digital text to have a corporeal, physical feeling. This [language] was language directed at my body, so I decided to create my own body out of it.”

What ultimately became her MFA thesis, Burn Everything Trust No One Kill Yourself, also contained music. Hayter wrote songs using both generated language and the structure of Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 The Rite of Spring, a landmark orchestral composition in which women dance themselves to death for the community’s survival. “It’s one of the most important pieces of music in the 20th century, and putting it with pornogrind lyrics was not well-received in the academic community,” Hayter says. “I wanted to take that meaningless language and impart it with my suffering and recontextualize violence as mine to dole out.”

Video artist and composer Alexander Dupuis first met Hayter in 2014 in a music course about composing with interactive electronics. He said Hayter talked about accidentally shooting herself with contact mics and sampling Tarkovsky. “The big ‘a-ha’ moments came those first few times seeing her perform,” Dupuis says. “I remember someone afterward, in shock, calling her a home run hitter, and I can’t put it better than that. It was like witnessing some heroic feat—you see someone move so skillfully from the operatic to the brutal, and the possibilities of the world open up a bit.”

While Hayter was gaining a reputation for her music and performances, she contemplated a career in higher education. But she says the visceral and uncompromising nature of her work alienated her in academic circles and prevented her from pursuing doctoral studies in music at Brown. “I hoped this work would impress them and get me into this program,” Hayter says. “Instead, I think it destroyed my chance of getting my PhD. at Brown. My thesis : SEPTEMBER 6 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 1 : D E C I 2021 B E L : DECIBEL

Surprisingly enough, considering her interests now,

Kristin did not enjoy loud sounds

and would clap her hands over her ears if classmates started screaming or getting loud.

MARY JANE HAYTER adviser looked at [my thesis] and said, ‘I don’t think we can do this. This is too violent and seems to condone violence. I don’t know if we can do it here.’ The final performance of my work went over well, but I think everyone preferred that I do something else.”

Hayter’s adviser John Cayley, chair of Brown’s literary arts department, remembers it slightly differently, although he says Hayter was “always a bit of an outlier.” “She kept her own counsel, and you could tell she was sharp and theoretically informed,” Cayley says. “You might try to direct her, but she might not be interested in what you were suggesting. That ‘you’ could be me or the class collective. She would have been an excellent high-ed teacher if she wanted to be.”

Cayley adds that he’d seen parts of Hayter’s thesis workshopped and “knew what it was going to be like.” “To be honest, some of the workshopped versions were even more powerful than the thesis presentation,” Cayley says. “Kristin was a consummate performer before she even came to the program.”

After Hayter liberated herself from her abuser, she became more active in the local music community and attended a range of underground shows: Drew McDowall, Timeghost, Humanbeast, Akiko Hatakeyama and the Body. Dupuis remembers attending an annual all-night experimental Bach marathon called Bach to the Future with Hayter. “Everyone remaining had managed to make it to about 5 or 6 a.m. when she gave a real stunner of performance just as the sun came up and streamed through the chapel windows,” Dupuis says. “She probably didn’t sing any Bach, though—I think she’s more of a Handel fan.”

Hayter, the outlier and consummate performer, ultimately decided that higher education was not her future. She instead immersed herself in the alternative music scene and got busy writing songs and recording—the component of her work that always received the most attention. Hayter opened for the Body and toured with them in 2017. She self-released her first EP, Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him. Within two years, her music was moving strangers to contact her on the internet.

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LINGUA IGNOTA CHAPTER 4:

PENNSYLVANIA

Hayter started working in earnest on Sinner Get Ready in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic.

She also released a steady stream of singles via Bandcamp, like a riveting cover of Eminem’s “Kim” that reimagines a song about domestic violence from a victim’s perspective. Her primary contacts were her musical partner and producer, Seth Manchester, and his multi-instrumentalist friend Ryan Seaton. Hayter would quarantine at an apartment at the Machines With Magnets studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and work on new material.

Manchester says the pair consciously avoided the metal trappings that Hayter intentionally embraced on Caligula. Sinner Get Ready instead feels more like a piece of vintage folk music paired with a roadshow during the Second Great Awakening, the 19th-century spiritual movement that birthed fundamentalism. “Kristin created a palette of ideas pretty early,” Manchester says. “We shared many records back and forth: early American music, Appalachian folk traditions, primitivism.

She has a whole reading list to accompany the record. I think we had a conversation about what instruments we wanted to hear on the record before we even started tracking the record.”

Manchester adds that it wasn’t challenging to make Sinner Get Ready feel both psychically and sonically heavy without a metal sheen. “We found other ways to make the record difficult and powerful through harmony, dissonance, extended or intentionally rudimentary playing techniques and letting things unfold very patiently,” he says.

“We knew that we also wanted parts of the record to sound huge from an arrangement perspective without drums and distortion.”

While Caligula was a product of Hayer’s engagement with and anger at the world, Sinner Get Ready is a product of her broken relationship and resulting retreat from the world. “I have spent the last year feeling marooned and rudderless in a remote world where I am constantly emotionally abused, betrayed and abandoned by the person I love,” she says. “This is about my weakness and codependency, patterns of loving

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someone who cannot be loved and cannot love in return. Doing the same thing again, not believing I am worthy of anything else, not being enough. I know that it was my higher purpose— music—that compelled me to free myself and the people who believe in me and believe I am doing something important.”

And while Caligula was grounded in Hayter’s psyche—and by extension the collective psyche of victims of abuse—Sinner Get Ready is conscious of physical place and geography. “I took Pennsylvania, and it became the site of my pain,” she says. “I used a lot more religious iconography from around here than I have in my past work. This is God’s country.”

CHAPTER 5:

FAITHFUL SERVANT and FRIEND of CHRIST

In West’s novel, the only time Miss Lonelyhearts finds a moment of peace is when he leaves the city with a woman named Betty. While his getaway offers a momentary respite, his return to the city only brings more dysfunction. Hayter’s move to central Pennsylvania also appeared to provide a chance at a new life, but days before this story was complete, Hayter writes and says that she has kicked out her partner. Hayter is

once again at a crossroads and seemingly without a firm footing. There is, however, an invisible wall of support: the listeners who found themselves in her work and the group of people who believe in Hayter as an artist. Hayter’s work is even being embraced outside of the small circles where she was first recognized; she recently contributed vocals for the soundtrack of The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It. “I love her voice, so hearing it so purely was inspiring,” Sargent House’s Pellow says of the new album. “I think that Sinner Get Ready is a natural transition for her as an artist. She continues covering deeply personal subjects seeped with the damage religion can bring to a person’s mental state. I would love to see what she could do directing a film—just imagine her take on what a 21st-century Biblical epic could be.”

Brown professor Cayley says he has kept up with his former student and likes what she did with the Body, although he finds her solo work a tough listen. He thinks Hayter has the skills to reach a mainstream audience—if she wanted to. “She would have to modulate what she does because it might not play to a larger audience,” Cayley says. “But she is the type of artist who could have a significant effect on a much larger audience and get them to think about things they otherwise might not think about.”

Hayter endured much during the past yearplus: physical pain, broken bonds and isolation.

Despite—or perhaps because of—these challenges, it’s the perfect time for Sinner Get Ready.

Hayter’s voice—one that is rooted in trauma and loss, grounded by everything from classical music to underground metal and powered by fierce will—is one that will resonate even more after a long period of widespread suffering. If the pandemic further abates, she will again be able to share that voice with an audience eager to cleanse and dispel their grief with collective experience.

Hayter will be ready. “I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself recently,” she says. “I can’t just go on not caring about myself and treating my body like trash. I can’t be so unhealthy and unhappy all the time. I have to figure out how to fucking live. I’m not there yet.”

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INSIDE ≥

68 DARE You hold the future in your hand 71 K.K.'S PRIEST Victim of no changes

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

72 MORDRED Blood Sugar Sex Tragic 74 SEVERED BOY He's cut off 76 DEE SNIDER He wants to rock...

and cum blood

When the Sun Hits

SEPTEMBER

Maybe DEAFHEAVEN’s shocking shoegaze departure isn’t all that shocking after all

99

Worn by Rogue Ales fans

5

Worn by Decibel staffers

2

Worn by Pig Destroyer members

1

Worn by Stanley Cup champion head coach

D

eafheaven tend to make their best moves when no one is keeping score. Case in point: 10 Years Gone, a career-spanning retrospective with recontextualDEAFHEAVEN ized versions of old songs captured live-to-tape with the Infinite Granite band’s longtime engineer Jack Shirley. The California quintet SARGENT HOUSE quietly released it in December 2020, months after Decibel’s Albums of the Year list was finalized, but 10 Years Gone was unquestionably one of the year’s best-sounding and most unconventional releases. In a year without live music, Deafheaven’s “live” album offered a capable alternative, and one that highlighted the band’s meticulous arrangements and mastery of tension-and-release. ¶ If last year presented an unscripted opportunity to look back and reflect, 2021 is all about blazing new trails. Infinite Granite is the first Deafheaven album that doesn’t feel like a direct reaction to or a repudiation of the album that came before it— there’s tons of space in this material, and you can immediately envision

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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what it might sound like live, especially in a context similar to 10 Years Gone. But looked at as a spiritual successor to 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love? Uh, well, it doubles or triples down on that album’s forays into glossier sounds, this time under the aegis of Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Tegan and Sara, and St. Vincent’s current musical director).

Vocalist George Clarke’s admiration of Slowdive is well-documented at this point, but it’s amazing to hear how much he actually sounds like Slowdive’s Neal Halstead when employing his full range. There are a couple of gnarlier bits on Infinite Granite where Clarke wails like a banshee (particularly the coda of “Villain”), but for most of the album, his dispassionate vocals provide sharp contrast to the bombast of the music—melding into something that is both downbeat and triumphant. The approach is echoed by guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra, both of whom set the tempo early and capture the narcotic allure of shoegaze with their cascading parts on “In Blur.”

As with all of their past material, Deafheaven present a surfeit of ideas on Infinite Granite, albeit with a stronger organizational sense than OCHL. This is a challenge with a band that seems to be consciously scaling back from writing 10-minute epics. Still, the album’s closer “Mombasa”—which starts with soothing ambient sounds and ends in a jarring fashion—is as beguiling and captivating as any of the band’s most dizzying peaks. There’s also a two-andhalf-minute passage at the end of “Mombasa” that is guaranteed to get lots of undies in a twist. It’s basically the only thing on Infinite Granite that even resembles black metal, but synthesized by a band that’s always 10 steps ahead of everyone else in crafting hymns at heaven’s gate. —NICK GREEN

ÆNIGMATUM

7

Deconsecrate 20 BUCK SPIN

Return to Ænnocence

Portland, OR’s Ænigmatum may have a ligature problem, but their sophomore effort, Deconsecrate, relentlessly pummels, grinds and shreds most shit in their respective peer group for breakfast. Featuring members of Skeletal Remains, Empyrean Fire and Blood of Martyrs, the lowflying quartet appears ready for a brutal reign atop 20 Buck Spin’s impressive roster. With a sound somewhere between Seance, Gorguts and Eucharist, this is high-velocity, cross-fretboard, nary-melodic, voice-of-Hell death metal. Deconsecrate never pauses for breath, water, or to change strings. It’s eight tracks and 45 minutes non-stop—the kind of death metal New York or 66 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Florida used to churn out (remember Resurrection or Eulogy?) back in the day.

But there’s a strange twist to Ænigmatum.

They’re tech and a hair unorthodox, as if they’ve studied Necrophagist and Archspire’s master theses while jamming the fuck out of “Raped by the Light of Christ” and “Ever-Opening Flower” as background music.

Deconsecrate rips, no doubt. But it’s hard to remember every sweet riff or drum part when they’re thrown at such a frenzied pace in such unnatural variations. This is something oldschoolers Atheist, Death and Dark Angel knew well: avoiding extremity for extremity’s sake.

All bone and marrow are great for occasions, but incessant assaults plateau against the old noggin a bit. Now, Ænigmatum do compensate briefly with “Fracturing Proclivity,” “Despot of Amorphic Dominions” and “Animus Reflection.”

On these tracks, the Beaver Staters roll slower (yet no less tortuous), and the payoff after repeated spins is that these songs edge to the top. Deconsecrate is wicked, but could use a prodigious helping of the almighty hook. —CHRIS DICK

ANATOMIA

8

Corporeal Torment DARK DESCENT

Just what the doctor ordered

Our daily torments are typically more spiritual than corporeal, except perhaps at the weekend when we have partaken of a particularly heavy lunch, topped off with a few cold ones, a bottle of red and an ill-advised cognac. Nothing that a couple of Tums and a nap won’t fix. Anatomia’s Corporeal Torment, however, presents a more acute condition, with the Japanese death-doom extremists taking the scenic route through the body’s less photogenic passages to offer a bleak meditation on sickness, death and general morbidity. But, hey, don’t let that put you off; it really takes your mind off things. You might even call it restorative, though “feel-good” would be pushing it.

Is this what Carcass would have sounded like if they tried to interpret Jeff Walker’s sister’s medical dictionary in abstract poetry instead of hyper-realistic prose? There’s a noble rot covering every aspect of the recording, from the performances to the three-dimensional production, which deploys just enough reverb to soak you in a fetid perfume of decomposing fuzz. The gatefold vinyl should come with hand sanitizer and menthol cream to apply liberally under the nostrils.

Like many of their peers—Krypts, Encoffination, Hooded Menace—Anatomia’s deathdoom can sound a little like death metal on warm milk and barbiturates, but they split the difference, opening the record with the

malformed thunder of lo-fi death before closing it out with long-form drones, screams, disembodied hollering and the fermented lowend vroom of “Mortem.” In those action-free moments, it’s all about atmospherics, transcending the body, playing like an experimental audio therapy experience tailored for the Mental Funeral generation. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

APOSTASY

8

Death Return FA L L E N T E M P L E

Lifetime investment

Chilean black-thrashers Apostasy, currently raiding the halls of the underground with their new album Death Return, have actually been around since the late ’80s. Their debut full-length, Sunset at the End (1991), reigns in obscure gem-nesty.

And even back then, Cristián “Profaner” Silva was pushing his bandmates into first-wave black metal territory with his demonically fast riffing style. After a 20-some-year hiatus, Apostasy released their sophomore album, The Sign of Darkness. The band had lost none of their hellfire momentum and the shock still lingers.

Now here comes Death Return, the third album from Profaner and another round of compatriot black thrash mercenaries. Because nowadays such a thing as black-thrash exists, and even though he’s the only extant member of the original Apostasy lineup, Profaner seems to have his pick of solid musicians practically raised on the metal he helped to usher into his country, if not pioneer. In other words, of course Death Return absolutely rips, crushes and is evil supreme.

Combining an authentically old-school approach to writing extreme metal with modern recording capabilities, the entirety of Death Return slashes and burns genre boundaries and expectations alike. Like Agent Orange-era Sodom or South of Heaven-era Slayer, Death Return rips and pummels simultaneously, a muscular, yet still lean and exceptionally powerful album that exemplifies the various subgenres more than it blends them. Seeming to tap into the very essence of burning Hell, track after track, riff after riff, from beginning to end, Death Return is a timeless commandment of red-hot metal supremacy. —DUTCH PEARCE

CRESCENT

Carving the Fires of Akhet LISTENABLE

Isn’t it pharaonic, don’t you think?

The only things that frighten my cat are other cats and the very biggest public works/

8

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RUMBLY RU MBLY THROUGH A SPEAKER THROUGH

construction vehicles—or at least that was the case until I played Carving the Fires of Akhet for the first time a few days ago. He didn’t flee far, nor was he gone long. By the time the glorious tremolo-picked nightmare that opens “Serpent of Avaris” kicked in (roughly the 14-minute mark), Takeshi (per Altered Carbon’s Takeshi Kovacs) had returned to the living room and was splayed out on the couch tonguing his asshole as if Crescent’s third full-length hadn’t full-on conjured up his inner scaredy-cat. Given past performances, his flight was perfectly understandable.

Not that Crescent sound any eviler than, say, Portal or Behemoth, let alone Nile, Melechesh, Scarab or any of the other bands they share an overarching obsession with. What sets the Cairo-born, Berlin-based quartet apart from all of the above (save for Scarab) is that founding members Ismaeel Attallah (lead guitar/lead vocals) and Youssef Saleh (guitar/vocals) grew up fully immersed in ancient Egyptian culture and audibly feel less compelled than their thematic peers to always be flexing junior speculative archeologist credentials; despite being ridiculously rich and as complex as, say, your average Ulsect jam, the songs on Carving couldn’t sound less contrived. Thanks to Victor “Santura” Bullok— who mixed and mastered the album—they also couldn’t sound better in a full-spectrum, genre-atypically thunderous way. It’s almost surely what prompted Tak to mistake an exemplary black/death release for a home-/manmade earthquake. —ROD SMITH

DARE

7

Against All Odds R E V E L AT I O N

It’s time to take a stand

You want to talk about a record that truly, fully, absolutely embodies its title? Look no further.

Between signing to Revelation, the insanely awesome ’80s skate/graffiti culture-inspired cover artwork and O.G. “keeper of the faith”/ Terror frontman Scott Vogel’s declaration that DARE is his “favorite band in hardcore right now,” expectations will no doubt be running extremely high for the Orange County quartet’s full-length debut. And I’m here to tell you, against all odds, this mix of old-school snarl, new-school groove (bassist Aaron McQueen is a Sergio Vega-level superstar), ultra-tight Sacred Reich-y thrash, classic-era Helmet cascades, the punk catchiness of that amazing second Kid Dynamite jam, Prong Cleansing levels of precision and tortured vokills straight outta the Mieszko Talarczyk school not only subjects every jaded sigh to death by a thousand razor-sharp riffs, 68 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Escape to the Rumble

BY DUTCH PEARCE

VITRIOLIC

MORTUARY SPAWN

HEADSPLIT

SEWER ROT

Renegade Ascension From southern Finland comes Vitriolic, a black/speed metal trio, who follow up two previous EPs and a live album with Renegade Ascension, their first full-length. Ten tracks of catchy blackened proto-thrash, zero interludes, Renegade Ascension moves like a knife through supple flesh. Shockingly fast, expertly clean and with much blood in its wake. Bangers with a need for evil speed similar to the likes of Nekromantheon or Bütcher will find the fix they’re looking for (and then some) on fret-burners like “Den of Vipers,” “Armageddon Messiah” and most definitely the title track.

Spawned From the Mortuary Mortuary Spawn’s debut EP embodies what excellent death metal is all about. That deadly tight, creatively brutal, intelligent-yet-savage kind of execution that lands demos on yearend lists and warrants immediate vinyl rebirth. Originally released by a local label out of Leeds, England, thankfully statesidebased debasers Sewer Rot have reissued the quintet’s debut for the masses. Ultraviolent drumming, infectiously memorable riffs, and plenty of dive bombs and brain-skewering solos meld together to form five hideously powerful abominations—and all in just 15 minutes. Impressive.

SHRIEKING DEMONS

REVENANT

CALIGARI

REALM & RITUAL

Diabolical Regurgitations This new Italian outfit calling themselves Shrieking Demons play their death-doom the oldschool way: soloing every chance they get, at least twice a song. And it is actual doom they play—substantial, heavy and catchy doom planted like a henge within their otherwise driving songs. The result, dubbed Diabolical Regurgitations, is four thick-skulled tracks of groovin’ death-doom ‘n’ roll. The psych-rock guitar work keeps Diabolical Regurgitations from ever venturing too deep into Autopsy worship, but that comparison comes so easily to mind because Shrieking Demons have conjured something genuinely killer here.

GIVRE

Le Pressoir Mystique FÓ L K VA N G R

Reformed during the pandemic, Givre are a Canadian black metal trio who release their sophomore album, Le Pressoir Mystique,, following an 11-year hiatus. The Quebecbased band set 14th century flagellant chants as well as traditional French music from the 16th century to atmospheric and medieval-influenced black metal, and the result is a deeply moving 25 minutes that utterly transports you to a time beyond the modern world. Six tracks in total, with corrosive guitar tones and achingly slow melodies, the whole of Le Pressoir Mystique moves like a procession of penitent masochists. Not your typical black metal album, and certainly unique for its provenance, Givre’s sophomore album already feels like an obscure gem.

Lost in Vigilance The long-awaited long player from Maine’s vengeful dark dungeon music purveyor Revenant, Lost in Vigilance, follows two demos from the fall of 2020. Cinematic in breadth and episodic therein, this fantastic project’s 13-track full-length feels like some new form of storytelling, something like a sonic novel.

Instrumental, but with plenty to express, Lost in Vigilance—boasting synthesized sounds and staggering talent—tells a tale of a lonely and bloody quest unto vengeance across time, recorded straight to tape. Fortunately, the tale seems to be ongoing, and copies of Lost in Vigilance remain available from R&R.

XANDELYER

Upheaval of Medieval Darkness FORBIDDEN SONORITY

Immediately the atmosphere of Upheaval of Medieval Darkness envelops you like a thick, stygian fog. A funereal, yet almost Nutcracker Nutcracker-like -like organ melody strikes up as a booming-butunintelligible voice drones menacingly. It’s all very over-the-top and feels a little like an amusement park, but the black metal that comes crashing in, like a Dracula throwing open his coffin lid, is all the stronger for its preamble. Despite only harboring two black metal tracks within its seamless 13 minutes, this German solo project’s debut exudes evil and dark potential. The first song saunters with claws and mid-paced menace, and the closing number slashes and blasts with dread powers unleashed before enfolding back into its vampyric ambience.

"Should not be missing in any death metal collection!"

-Deaf Forever

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but also runs circle pits around virtually all of the band’s better-established peers.

It’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment, and a throwback in the best possible sense to the early-to-mid-’90s heyday of Revelation, when virtually every new release felt powered by revolutionary fire or alchemic experimentation. While Against All Odds doesn’t break the sort of new ground those albums did, the spirit and palette is, respectively, liberated and broad.

It’s a decidedly metallic hardcore release from a band that sounds as if its comprised of players with record collections that are much more expansive than that. Add to the mix vulnerable, incisive lyrics that examine the scene and larger culture from the point of view of people of color and it’s clear that DARE deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as Rotting Out, Mizery, Incendiary and others at the vanguard of hardcore. —SHAWN MACOMBER

DEAD HORSE

9

Horsecore: An Unrelated Story That’s Time Consuming SELF-RELEASED

Slay is for horses

If you experience a mild palsy of repulsion at the prospect of another remixed/remastered album, then congratulations! You’ve successfully passed my “prove you’re not a robot” test! For every worthy retouch on the market, there’s a corresponding multitude of others that—without consideration for an album’s best interests—merely rip the volume knob off the fucking console to decibels that’d make tinnitus blush, or seemingly do nothing other than function as a shell game for some label to peddle shit back to us that we already own.

If those Megadeth re-releases from the early aughts have given you PTSD, allow me to offer you a little equine therapy. dead horse have always played in their own, ant-infested, broken bottle-littered sandbox. Their ’89 debut album blended the most righteously unmannered elements of S.O.D., early Suicidal, Butthole Surfers and a skosh of Merle Haggard into a boozy Texan slurry.

Unfortunately, the album’s $2,000 budget left Horsecore sounding like it was belching out of an old Panasonic with a broken equalizer— a travesty considering how good these tunes are. This record was born an excellent candidate for cosmetic surgery.

Well, ask and (30-plus years later) ye shall receive; this re-release not only kills, but is essential. Throw a dart at the tracklist and you’ll nail a riff that would make Ryan Waste 70 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

sweat clean through his bandana (except for “Scottish Hell”; Entombed were clearly sweating that one). Michael Haaga remains one of the genre’s best vocalists this side of Holy Terror’s sorely missed Keith Deen. But more than any one component, it’s the band’s perfectly peculiar chemistry that really shines in this retelling of an old, but unrelated story. There are none like dead horse. Horsecore will prove it to you. —FORREST PITTS

FLESHBORE

6

Embers Gathering INNERSTRENGTH

The sound is the fury

It’s probably not what techdeath proponents, death metal degenerates and/or Fleshbore themselves may want to read here, but what’s most enjoyable about Embers Gathering is how the instrument separation captured in the production benefits the final result. The snare’s ’90s timbre works in concert with typewriter-clean kicks to illuminate Tyler Mulkey’s performance, especially as he charges in and out of transitions and tempo changes. There are parts in “Careless Preacher” where the differences between his main tub-thumped targets inadvertently create a stanchion-solid classic rock groove amid furious Voivod-gone-classical chord washes.

The sonic space also allows room for Cole Daniels to put his four-string (or however many strings kids today have on their basses) acumen on display. “Momentum” and “Cynicism” have his head poking above the surface with some fancy Cliff Burton-meets-Alex Webster work that complements the diverging guitars and octave exploitation in the name of metal that gravitates between clean room brutality and concert hall hoity-toity-ness; all of this while Michael O’Hara chokes, throttles, growls, grunts, pig-squeals and slithers like early Kataklysm over what his bandmates throw against the wall and hope will stick behind him like properly cooked pasta.

Embers Gathering is a great album for sound, studio and music theory nerds, but unfortunately, a discouraging amount of the above comes tethered to a lack in the songs department. There are plenty of excellent parts, but these six tracks are too often about how awesome the individual parts are instead of how awesome it could be if those parts were related and flowed into one another. “The Scourge” and “One Thousand Hands” are primo examples of lacing together sections in the pursuit of something with long-term recollection properties. More like them, please.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

FULCI

6

Exhumed Information TIME TO KILL

More fun than a stabbed eye

Italian director Lucio Fulci was an auteur of gore, known for some of the most nauseating set-pieces in horror cinema. But focusing solely on the splatter doesn’t capture the real impact of his legacy as a master of gothic atmosphere and suspense. It’s little surprise that by borrowing the director’s surname, horror hounds Fulci have created a death metal homage to his filmography. In 2019, they honored the shocking classic Zombi 2 with their Tropical Sun LP. Now they’re back with another offering to one of the grandfathers of gore, Exhumed Information.

The new album rises from the grave for 32 minutes of pit slams and ripping death based on the plot of one of Fulci’s underseen final films, Voices From Beyond. One of the elements that elevates this album is the extent to which Fulci integrate slasherwave synths from electro/ ambient collaborator TV-CRIMES. While the synth prominence makes Exhumed Information a jarring listen filled with stylistic hairpin turns, it also helps capture the heyday of practical FX and Video Nasties on VHS. It’s fitting that the band worked with Arthur Rizk for mastering, since Rizk’s own Eternal Champion project has been incorporating more synths as well.

But Exhumed Information is still primarily focused on writing brutal songs that filter the film through Morrisound’s stacks—at least for the first half. Smears of Obituary and Skinless DNA soak standout tracks like “Voices” and “Tomb.” As the album marches to its conclusion, “Fantasma” is the band’s best mixture of styles to date. But “Funeral” is lifeless, perhaps by design. Unfortunately, Fulci’s metallic components don’t feel nearly as striking and memorable as the visuals they’re hoping to honor.

—SEAN FRASIER

GRAVE

6

Hating Life MDD

SAMAEL

8

Passage MDD

1996 called… on a fucking landline

Formed in Baden-Württemberg in 1995, German indie MDD isn’t a new label, but they’re making a concerted effort to improve brand recognition through new releases (Suidakra) and reissues (Tiamat, Unleashed).

Previous issues of clutch second-album era Grave/Unleashed—along with a surprise redux of unsung American thrashers Détente and largely ignored Swedeath purveyors the Everdawn—have been welcomed and required, considering original presses (U.S. or German) are now commanding top dollar.

Now, whether or not you were there in 1996, both Grave and Samael released head-scratching albums at the very root of extreme metal’s “ugly hair” period. The old ways were out with the ark. There was no new way, in particular, other than to not repeat or sound like what got these bands off the ground in the first place. To wit, Grave’s jump from Soulless (1994) to Hating Life (1996) was/still is particularly unjust, even if it was produced at Sunlight with Skogsberg behind the desk. Apparently, Grave frontman Ola Lindgren wanted his own (sans-Jörgen Sandström) death ‘n’ roll masterstroke. He didn’t get it.

On the other side of the coin, Swiss cult leaders Samael electroni-fied the successes (“Baphomet’s Throne,” et al.) of Ceremony of Opposites on their breakthrough effort, Passage.

The transition here wasn’t too off. Opener “Rain” hit the proverbial gong, as did “Shining Kingdom,” “The Ones Who Came Before,” “Born Under Saturn” and video single “Jupiterian Vibe.” What ultimately sold/sells Passage was/ is the combo of Vorph’s trademark snarl and Waldemar Sorychta’s rounded production.

The necessity of MDD’s reissues can be questioned, however. Samael’s long-player has been reconfigured numerous times, while Grave’s sad song has remained as-is since 1996, barring Floga’s 12-inch exclusive in 2015. Plus, these are as-were reissues—no remastering, bonus or otherwise. —CHRIS DICK

HIRAES

6

Solitary N A PA L M

She will rise

More Americans ought to get familiar with Britta Görtz, in this writer’s opinion, one of the most talented vocalists in extreme metal. She first came to my attention while fronting defunct and underrated German groove-thrash outfit Cripper; she elevated that band’s competent-but-rote attack into something that I thought would do well opening for Lamb of God. When I heard that Angela Gossow was departing Arch Enemy, Görtz was my fan choice for her replacement, though Cripper were active at that time.

Now that Cripper are interred, it seems as though Görtz is trying her best to follow my fancasting by fronting another capital-M melodic

death metal band, Hiraes. She performs alongside former members of Dawn of Disease, a band I hadn’t listened to previously and now probably never will because their instrumentals here are serviceable, but uninspiring. Their debut album, Solitary, delivers prerequisite triumphant melodies, but none push their hooks into soccer chant territory—that’s what made Amon Amarth the commercial juggernaut of this style, after all.

When listening to Solitary, I often thought the album had been accidentally put on shuffle— these songs run together without much variation. Giving them personality ought to be Gortz’s job, but her performance is buried in the mix, blunting her power. I’m not willing to write Hiraes off for this. Dawn of Disease called it quits less than a year ago, suggesting that Solitary was put together in a rush, possibly with riffs intended for another singer. If they zero in on what they have with Görtz and craft more infectious melodies, they’ll make a nice career for themselves, rendering Solitary a fun-but-rocky proof of concept. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

K.K.’S PRIEST

5

Sermons of the Sinner E X P LO R E R 1

Nodding off in the pew

Last time we heard from original Priest guitarist Ken “K.K.” Downing in a metal way, he was plying his talents on the truly questionable Nostradamus album in 2008. You’d be forgiven if, due to his lack of musical activity since exiting Priest in 2011, you figured he’d thrown in the towel and left the music biz behind altogether for a quieter, more bucolic life on his palatial Astbury Hall estate and golf course. By all accounts, however, that wasn’t exactly his plan. Downing actually, at some point in the last decade, made noise about rejoining Priest, but was rebuffed. Apparently, there’s enough bad blood between him and the Hill/Halford/Tipton triumvirate that he wasn’t even drafted into any of the 50-year anniversary festivities.

Downing’s reply to this slight is new music, made under the poke-in-eye moniker of K.K.’s Priest. He even enlisted Halford fill-in, Tim “Ripper” Owens, to really seal the deal. [Insert eye-roll emoji here.] And then there’s the album title. Nothing subtle about any of it. Downing still wants to be in Priest, Priest don’t want him in their Priest, so he’s going to take his guitar and start his own Priest, K.K.’s Priest. Got it?

There’s also nothing subtle about Downing and Owens’ intentions regarding the material on Sermons of the Sinner. Downing may think he’s showing his former bandmates how it’s done or

whatever, but he’s created an album that sounds like a parody of a Judas Priest tribute band. It also feels like the musical equivalent of a tryingto-be-spiteful-but-coming-off-as-mostly-pathetic drunken text sent to an ex after a nasty breakup. Downing is still plenty talented at age 69, but this was not the best way for him to get back in the game. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

LANTLÔS

7

Wildhund

PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS

A gaze in the northern sky

Was anyone shocked when Ihsahn covered a-ha’s “Manhattan Skyline” last year? Or was it just an inevitable, slow-dawning conclusion that black metal’s kvlt credentials were an illusion and the genre owed more to kosmische musik, new wave and synthpop than we dared admit.

Fume at Deafheaven’s descent into 4AD shoegazey dreaminess all you want, but don’t overlook Fenriz’s Chicago house tattoo or Euronymous’ penchant for krautrock. Not all is binary, mace-swinging comrades.

And so it comes to pass that Germany’s Lantlôs have also shed the guttural shrieks and frostbitten atmospherics of their 2008 self-titled debut.

Following a similar trajectory to French postblackened forest-dwellers Alcest (with whom they once shared members) Lantlôs (technically just Markus Siegenhort) have become progressively more, well, progressive over five albums, with Wildhund sharing more in common with Deftones than Darkthrone. The transition to post-rock isn’t as barefaced as Deafheaven’s; we’re still sliding into pandemonium, with the tracks feeling like you’re stuck between two rooms at a basement sex club, one playing Depeche Mode and the other glitchy BDSM techno; but then that level of messy anarchy is very 2021. The clang and chaos underpinning the cascading dream-pop feels like Lantlôs are not yet ready to step out of the shadows, but that evolution is imminent. —LOUISE BROWN

LINGUA IGNOTA

8

Sinner Get Ready SARGENT HOUSE

The heart of man is a scalded wreck

Kristin Hayter’s music is about songcraft in the same way that modern dance is about finding the groove and getting down—which is to say, it’s not, and wishing for it just misses the point. Lingua Ignota turns its artistic purpose toward processing that which cannot be sanely processed, and anything less DECIBEL : SEP TEMBER 2021 : 71

than undammed torrents of expression would limit this music’s value to its creator and its audience alike. Sometimes Lingua Ignota celebrates the quavering humanity of the lone voice, and other times it rejoices in the way one voice can ricochet—clanging, disconcerting—off of other voices and instruments and accidental sounds in hard, sinewy ways that defy coordination.

Metalheads are used to a kinder form of dissonance, one that whips quickly by in a blur of momentary discomfort, resolved and integrated quickly into the dense whole of the song. Hayter lets dissonance linger, intensify, then break off into something even more disturbing. While these sonic art pieces would seem alien in a rock club, they are perfectly suited to a dimly (but precisely, intentionally) lit room that is meant to hold no more than 10 people, but somehow accommodates 30, stuffed into the far corners and doorways and the adjoining kitchenette.

But “Pennsylvania Furnace” is a song, humid as it is with tender, wrung-out emotion. Any other band would fall all over itself just to close a record with this much power, but Hayter places it nonchalantly in one of Sinner’s early center positions. Eleven minutes or so later, as the album does indeed wind toward its end, more

true songs blossom in somewhat more controlled patterns. Still, every track here builds a world unto itself, giving listeners the space to get lost in each of the album’s nine pocket universes. If you bring Lingua Ignota into your life, prepare to make it your new obsession. —DANIEL LAKE

MORDRED

4

The Dark Parade M-THEORY

And I preordered this thing…

The last Mordred album, 1994’s The Next Room, was largely ignored because it no longer resembled past triumphs. Let’s be honest: 1989’s Fool’s Game and its grown-up counterpart, 1991’s In This Life, were way ahead of their time. Smart musicianship, experimental flourishes, a melodic disposition and turntablist Aaron “Pause” Vaughn were ingrained to a near seamless end. Tracks like “Spectacle of Fear,” “State of Mind,” “In this Life” and the exceptional “Falling Away” expertly countered Mordred’s funkier, flashier sides in “Every Day’s a Holiday,” “Super Freak” (yes, a Rick James cover), “The Strain” and the infectious grooves of

THE ONLY LIVE ALBUM

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MOTÖRHEAD

0

No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith (box set) BMG

In the late ’90s, when digital recording improvements suddenly made it possible for a band to record a concert and pretty much release it right away (hello, Pearl Jam), some of the specialness of a killer live set from a favorite band was lost. This was also around the time the music industry decided that vinyl should go extinct because no one wanted it.

The era of the career-defining live set was pretty much over.

72 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Thankfully, we can relive (or experience for the first time) those days via reissues like this one. No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith was Motörhead’s classic lineup—Kilmister/ Clarke/Taylor—at the height of its powers, its undeniable peak, and the trio was rewarded with a No. 1 chart position in the U.K. at the time. This was momentous for a band that had been savaged by the press for years, yet adored by its loyal fans. One need only listen

the unexpectedly prescient “Esse Quam Videri.”

We didn’t know it at the time, but Mordred were underdogs of a musical revolution that included Faith No More, Suicidal Tendencies, Primus and ultra-underdogs Scatterbrain.

The reunion of Mordred has in and of itself brought back fond memories of trying to process the left-fieldisms as an indelible thenteenager. When the Volition EP landed in 2020, I was stoked, quite possibly excited. What I had thought Mordred are (or rather were)—melodic, eccentric, visionary, heavy—didn’t translate to what Mordred actually are now. This is to say, The Dark Parade, some years in the making, has unfortunately reinforced what Volition was projecting. From opener “Demonic #7” to whatever “Smash Goes the Bottle” is trying to be, The Dark Parade is jagged, weird (in a bad way), blocky and not at all comfortable in its own skin.

Vocalist Scott Holderby talks through most of it, too. The last thing I need is a guy lecturing me while Judgment Night’s remedial cousin jumps up and down in the background. There are moments of almost-Mordred—“Dragging for Bodies” and “Dented Lives”—but be prepared (unlike me) for another round of The Next Room. Only this time it hurts more. —CHRIS DICK

to NSTH in its remastered form presented here to see why this album has been held in such high esteem for four decades.

Motörhead blaze through a relentless set (drawn from three U.K. gigs in spring 1981) of songs from their first four albums that hits on the highlights from every one—from opener “Ace of Spades” to closer “Motörhead.”

Vic Maile handles the production perfectly, cleaning up the rough edges, but keeping everything truly raw and powerful. You can be certain that, unlike many live albums of the era, very little was added later. The bonus material here is ample (depending on what format you purchase), and some of coolest musical inclusions are the full sets the tracks on NSTH were taken from, where you really get the warts-and-all sound (and occasional false starts) that defined each gig.

The accompanying booklet offers hilarious memories—via roadies and the opening act— from the 1981 tour, as well as rare photos and gig poster reproductions. Motörhead made plenty of quality music after this, but this album has always struck me as the finest, truest distillation of what the band was about.

Not only is this arguably the best metal album ever recorded, it may well be Motörhead’s finest. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

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8 OUR PLACE OF WORSHIP IS SILENCE Disavowed, and Left Hopeless T R A N S L AT I O N L O S S

Bow to them splendidly

Our Place of Worship Is Silence’s previous release sounded like a bestial black metal band was forced to practice and go to an actual studio.

Disavowed, and Left Hopeless sounds like they just kept on that path.

The most significant change on this album is how much more prominent they’ve made the guitar. Instead of clawing their way from behind the blasting and gross, hateful vocals, the riffs are elevated, showing off just how goddamn good they are. These songs actually have intricacies, and whatever bruised melodies were skipped or lost before are given a spotlight. This justifies what, on the whole, are longer songs that build methodically, like the last few minutes of the incredible “Fury Divine.” There’s a greater diversity here that never falls into those quiet, proggy, reverbheavy jams that find their way into a lot of songs like these. And that’s important because, while this is technically more palatable, it’s really just been honed and clarified, a brutality that will stick with you much longer.

The only gripe here involves bass. The previous record’s best-sounding element was the gnarled bass tone, and its demotion in the mix is missed. But considering that everything else got an upgrade, this can be forgiven. And it’s unlikely we’ll see Our Place of Worship Is Silence continue refining until they start putting out pop records; whatever they did to make something like Disavowed, and Left Hopeless, they should keep doing it as long as they can.

—SHANE MEHLING

PRAISE THE PLAGUE

8

The Obsidian Gate LIFEFORCE

Voluptuous horror with a down-to-earth cinematic flair

Oblivion and (even more so) utter nothingness are difficult AF, if not impossible, to depict convincingly—especially when it comes to lyrics written in the first person. Plain ol’ regular death is daunting enough for any entity unwilling to strictly emulate worms, bacteria, chemical reactions and the like—i.e., pretty much every metal band in the world. This, in part, is why death metal tends to present its overarching topic as somebody else’s problem, and 74 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 : D E C I B E L

funeral doom lyrics so often rely on some kind of residual presence, some scrap of personality just robust enough to complain and/or ruminate on its (probably) eternal post-life reality for the length of a song. Condemned for even longer to dogpaddle in flimsier aethers still, anti-cosmic black metal lyrics all too often end up reading like long-term wish lists from people you’d probably rather not hang out with.

While Praise the Plague’s second studio full-length pretty much celebrates voidsville’s attractions from start to finish, the Berlin-based blackened doom/sludge quintet adroitly skirts all of the above pitfalls by passing on fantasyland, instead dwelling pretty much from start to finish inside the experiences of dissolution, desolation, and irrevocable loss that infiltrate and infect everyday human/posthuman existence around the world. Musically, the band tends to favor the big, the stately and the convulsively beautiful, sometimes—per “Blackening Swarm II” and “The Ascent”—manifesting their preoccupations with so much exuberance that you just might find yourself doing elegant one-wizard air-dives into imaginary black holes when nobody else is around. —ROD SMITH

QRIXKUOR

8

Poison Palinopsia DARK DESCENT

Triple word score

The unfamiliar would be forgiven for wondering whether this U.K./New Zealand band stumbled upon their name during a competitive game of Scrabble. The reality is, unsurprisingly, more kvlt: Qrixkuor comes from the writings of occultist (and former left-hand man to Aleister Crowley) Kenneth Grant, and is supposedly numerically equivalent to the number of the beast.

Qrixkuor, the band, are composed of shrouded musicians—S (guitars, vocals), VK (bass) and DBH (drums)—who have spent time crafting extreme cacophonies in underground earmanglers such as Vassafor, Grave Miasma and Cruciamentum, to name a few. Pulling hard on past experiences over recent years, Qrixkuor have sculpted a distinctively opaque and nightmarish death metal sound—one that also draws from black metal, doom, drone, avant-garde psychedelia and even classical, and comes into menacing bloom on full-length debut Poison Palinopsia. This 48-minute chaos-chasm of an album consists of just two labyrinthine compositions that fly past like a fever dream, making the listener feel as though they’ve downed a handful of slimy magic mushrooms and walked backwards through a hall of (broken) mirrors.

For the extreme metal-schooled, you’ll hear Incantation, Morbid Angel, Mayhem, Immolation, Demigod and other denizens of disorder throughout this record. But dig a little deeper into this engrossing headfuck and it’ll become apparent that this trio’s palette is seemingly overflowing with diverse inspirations, from Dmitri Shostakovich to Diamanda Galás. There’s a level of class to what they’ve created on this album that puts Qrixkuor ahead of many other bands that exist in the arcane intersection between death and black metal. —DEAN BROWN

SEVERED BOY

7

Tragic Encounters CALIGARI

Too bad vaccines can’t add hours to the day

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the many bands and projects that formed in the past 16 months after COVID wanes and regular band life gets back to normal.

Although it may not have seemed so over the past year-plus, time is finite and there are only so many things one can cram into a 24-hour period. Lazy fucks like yours truly may do a lot less than this Boston duo with the intervals constructed by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but it’ll be nice to have the option to stare at a different set of walls.

Severed Boy, featuring members of Phantom Glue and Lunglust, formed out of “a quarantined manic episode” and accelerated the usual “form band, write songs, record songs, release songs” timeline to deliver a dynamic death-doom beast thematically focused on the role that sociopathic lack of empathy plays in horrific incidents. And there’s no more appropriate a subgenre to discuss such a topic via ties to Incantation, Grave Miasma and Hooded Menace, with Hellhammer anchoring one end and Portal the other.

Severed Boy have the usual two death-doom gears, but what works towards their individuation is how Nicholas Wolf and Reid Calkin stack creepy melodies and haunting arpeggios over dank, cobblestone dungeon riffing. When they pick up the pace, as they do in parts of “Sparse Forest of Memories” and “Mindless Future Breaker,” the layers (d)evolve into a miasmic carousel, hence the Portal comparison. Additionally, they’re not afraid to step outside the box with both “Agony and Despair,” an Apocalyptic Raids-esque harrowing ambient noise piece, and the Soundgarden-inspired shimmer introducing “Pooling.” Let’s hope they stay alive after COVID is killed off.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

Malice Divine Melodic Black Metal/Death Metal From Canada!

FFO: Dissection, Immortal, Uada, Skeletonwitch, Death Find us on:

malicedivine.bandcamp.comt

DECIBEL : SEP TEMBER 2021 : 75

DEE SNIDER

8

Leave a Scar N A PA L M

Scarred, but smarter

SODOM

6

Bombenhagel STEAMHAMMER/ SPV

Signs of life

Sodom are best described as a perpetual motion machine. Bombenhagel is their sixth EP since 2014 alone, and (depending on what constitutes a release to you) is their 49th release altogether.

The German thrashers record to propel their relentless live schedule, as most full-time bands are forced to. Bombenhagel’s press release even specifies, “Originally we had planned to bring out the record in time for this year’s summer festival season, including a sticker with all confirmed tour dates… all gigs will be postponed until 2022… the EP will be released anyway, as a sign of life.”

76 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

SPIRIT ADRIFT, Forge Your Future

9

Born into fire | C E N T U R Y M E D I A

Now six years into his journey with Spirit Adrift, founder Nate Garrett is still a student of the song. What began as a solo project blossomed into an expression of heavy metal without subgenre qualifiers. The sludge of the project’s first demo was part of Garrett’s perpetual passage into new realms of inspiration. Forge Your Future is the project’s Century Media debut, offering three new songs packed with sparkling choruses and shimmering leads. The sample size might be small, but they hint at Garrett’s songwriting talent polished even sharper than the swords held aloft on the Enlightened in Eternity cover.

After the title track’s opening sigh of melody, the rest of the EP feels like an extension of Enlightened in Eternity. That makes sense, since less than a year passed between releases and engineer Ryan Bram returned to collaborate. But with renowned

Their most recent full-length, last year’s Genesis XIX, has hardly grown cold. Critical reception for the band is consistently positive, with good reason: Angelripper and company are exceptionally good at what they do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of their releases are essential, however. Take this EP—a re-recording of “Bombenhagel” from 1987’s Persecution Mania is reworked, resulting in a bouncy and almost cheerfully patriotic vibe. But is this a version that the fans need? Hardly. Yes, the band has been consistently offering up new variants of old classics on these EPs, but to use “Bombenhagel” as an opening track is a bold and somewhat odd move.

Next up are two originals—thrashy number “Coup de Grace,” whose galloping progressions and shouted vocals are laden with D-beat vibes—followed by down-tuned chugger

metal architect Christopher “Zeuss” Harris now in the fold for mixing and mastering, there’s additional depth in the EP's sound.

The harmonized leads remain. Garrett’s vocals continue to soar with reverb. But Forge Your Future commits even more time to fortifying the enchanting mid-’80s choruses. Think postSabbath Ozzy, or Scorpions when their singles seduced the world. “Wake Up” could have relied on the massive vocal hooks alone. But the song’s second half unfolds with a balance of majestic shred and sunrise warmth. That seems to be Garrett’s gift: embracing the excess and unpredictability of metal’s golden age without succumbing to those whims. “Invisible Enemy” shifts between brawn and beauty, with strings and synths subtly supporting the guitars.

Despite feeling considerately structured, there’s a live-wire electric current that makes Spirit Adrift’s compositions worthy of many revisitations. —SEAN FRASIER

“Pestiferous Posse.” The latter is floating and ethereal during a long mid-song transition; otherwise, it delivers classic Sodom in the form of growling, howling, driving instrumentation.

All told, the EP is a tasty morsel, but hardly a necessary purchase for anyone but the most strident of fans. —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

TOMBSTONER

6

Victims of Vile Torture REDEFINING DARKNESS

This ain’t your father’s metal…

OK, maybe it is

While the Undertaker’s finishing move is the Tombstone, Tombstoner make music that wrestlers probably listen to in between suplexes.

PHOTO BY DILLON VAUGHN

Dee Snider’s superpower does not lie in his makeup application skills. On that we can all agree.

Twisted Sister’s “image”—along with Snider’s ample songwriting chops—achieved its intended attention-getting goal in the ’80s, but it also made everything he did afterward that much more of an uphill battle, trying to escape from the credibility hole he and his band dug when they turned into caricatures. Lucky for Snider, his superpower is that he’s a relentless motherfucker.

Bouncing back from having your teeth sharpened into fangs while sporting a face full of Maybelline’s finest is no easy feat. But Snider has always loved a good fight—see pretty much every song he’s ever written—so it’s no surprise that he’s not only still standing, but kicking ass.

No matter the decade—short hair, long hair, no makeup, whatever—his commitment to metal has rarely wavered. So, when he makes albums like Leave a Scar with Jamey Jasta producing (hell yeah, there are breakdowns!) and a quartet of young guns backing him, there are certain things that you can reliably expect: solid, impassioned vocals; songs about rocking and sticking it to the man; and musical integrity. There’s even an unlikely cameo from George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, who does his thing on “Time to Choose.”

Snider knows and values his brand, and in his sixth decade doing this, he’s not gonna take any steps backward. Leave a Scar is modern and plays to his love of a good anthem, but nothing about it seems forced. It touches on many of the eras of his career unselfconsciously; good songs still just flow out of the dude. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

Victims of Vile Torture is real bread-and-butter tough-guy metal from a bygone era, and the biggest question is if you want to go back there.

What we have is an amalgam of Cannibal Corpse, Hatebreed and a local band that snagged the opening slot on Fear Factory’s Demanufacture tour. It aims to be some sort of groovy death metal hardcore from the ’90s and does what it can to live up to that promise. Despite some odd stabs at symphonic metal on a couple songs, there’s little that doesn’t fit into the aforementioned buckets, and so in that sense, it’s a success. This is heavy on the death metal, and it all flows seamlessly together. But checking all those boxes is also what hobbles the record.

There are some good riffs throughout, pulled from realms that still sound good today. But the overall sound and approach is of a very specific time period, one that feels past its expiration and isn’t particularly interesting to listen to anymore. When not growling, the frontman bears a resemblance to Max Cavalera, and had this record been Soulfly’s debut in 1998, people would have understandably lost their shit. If you are still looking for that record 23 years later, Tombstoner are here. If not, then Victims of Vile Torture is probably best blasted from auditorium speakers as someone flies off the top rope. —SHANE MEHLING

VORVAN

8

Awakened DA R K E N E D DAY S

A new Red Scare

Oh, those pesky Russians.

Not only have they been scaring hockey players since the 1972 Summit Series (and boxers since Rocky IV); now they’re nudging back towards global superpower prominence. Since 2016, they seem to have more influence on American elections than most Americans, as Republicans take pointers from them on how to eradicate democracy. On top of that, they have—ahem—shut the window on quelling free speech and dissent.

Another area our vodka-swilling friends are nipping at dominance in is metallic hardcore.

Okay, that’s not entirely true, because the Russian challenge to the podium crowded by all your Hydra Head, Relapse, Deathwish Inc., et al favorites comes solely from these Muscovites, whose history goes back to 2009 and includes a handful of awesome recordings, including this, their second full-length.

Latter-day Converge is the order of the day on Awakened, with caustically sidewinding riffs, a swaggering shuffle and the ability of Eli Mavrychev’s burly throat to carve out hooky lines illustrating where Vorvan excel above most 78 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

others. “Hyenas” rushes out of the gate with quick staccato grind contrasted against linear inflections and a ridiculously groovy midsection. “Paths We Have Strayed From” pours many of the best parts of the last decade of Kurt Ballou’s axe-slinging into one dynamic shotgun spray. “Superscum” is part-Mastodon, partBotch, all-earworm, with a stunning “I-tooklessons-from-Joe Satriani” lead and exemplary crescendo. And just to add a little spice, there’s a definite hair metal strut to “Niebo.”

There’s a bit too much You Fail Me in some of the mid-tempo chugging, and some of the clean vocals should be reconsidered and scaled back on until Mavrychev grows out of his monochromatic moan, but overall Awakened definitely deserves a listen. Why should the NSA be the only American attention they get? —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

WITCH VOMIT

8

Abhorrent Rapture 20 BUCK SPIN

VOMIT RITUAL

6

Callous

P U LV E R I S E D

Bibs are highly encouraged

I was initially thrilled to be assigned these reviews simply because of the obvious fun to be had at the expense of the bands’ concurrent tummy troubles. Sadly, both releases are much too good to squander my word count on observations regarding mixing ritual magik and Chipotle, so wheel out the mop-bucket!

Sure, you could draw a straight enough line from Witch Vomit to label alumnus Cerebral Rot, but when listening to Abhorrent Rapture, I’m transported to a time when one special little boy first heard Carcass via their Peel Sessions release. The thrill of that initial encounter is nearly impossible to replicate, but Witch Vomit allude to that spark of dreadful revelation plausibly enough to force a nostalgic rictus across my weathered visage. It’s like catching a whiff of fresh apple pie cooling on an operating table.

Along the Carcass timeline, this mini-LP lies somewhere between Symphonies and Descanting: too overtly DM for the former and too sonically putrid for the latter. Indeed, this is the porridge that Goldilocks regurgitated.

Now, as sacramental upchucking goes, Callous is a good deal tidier than anticipated.

Vomit Ritual are adept when it comes to neatly integrating droning tension, eccentric amelodicism and lugubrious doom. The band divulges an unusual ambivalence between ruminative passages that demand tremendous

patience from the listener and a fidgety need to continually elaborate upon a movement with keening whale-song leads or half-buried acoustic remarks. There’s always another weird amenity or abstruse nook for the listener to alight within. Yes, Callous is unsatisfactorily brief and the drum tone sucks, but the fact that I’ve swung from pleasantly surprised to budgeting in the funds to score Vomit Ritual merch should speak volumes to the curious.

So, grab some sawdust and lace up your nonslip shoes. These bands are sick. —FORREST PITTS

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM

8

Primordial Arcana RELAPSE

The earth giveth, the earth taketh my money

It’s never been hard to get excited about a new Wolves in the Throne Room record. 2006 debut Diadem of 12 Stars was exciting because it felt like a new kind of music was being birthed from older forms. Two Hunters and Black Cascade were exciting for their harrowing, mystic darkness.

Celestial Lineage was exciting because it was just so fucking good!

But Primordial Arcana might be the band’s most immediately tantalizing album to date. Do we owe that to Kody Keyworth’s contributions, now that he’s become a full member since the writing and recording of 2017’s Thrice Woven? Possibly, but that kind of minutiae also doesn’t entirely matter. These six songs punch and claw and climb to heights at least equal to anything the band has created in the past.

If there’s anything to criticize, it’s maybe that they blow their melodic load so early— opener “Mountain Magick” takes no prisoners with its authoritative metallic strut, and then it settles into the most affecting guitar lead on the record. “Spirit of Lighting” takes the baton from there; it seems to know it already has big shoes to fill, and does so with a highly individualistic, almost ritualistic sound led by what appears to be a harp. Throughout Arcana, the atmospheric accents come on fast and strong, coloring in the corners of an album already rich with powerful songs.

There’s a death metal finish to some of these riffs and vocals, which adds further contrast and heightens the whole experience. “Masters of Rain and Storm” sputters a little, offering a melodic line with no satisfying resolution, but by then we’ve gotten more than enough highlights to warrant adding this record into frequent rotation. The Wolves occupy that throne now, and they’re not likely to give it up any time soon. —DANIEL LAKE

I N W H I C H W E R E V I E W V I N Y L I N A N D O F T H E H E AV I E S T R O TAT I O N S

BY SHANE MEHLING

HADIT

With Joy and Ardour Through the Incommensurable Path 12-inch [SENTIENT RUIN]

I’m worried that the record title will be longer than the review, but this blackened death metal duo pulls out some bizarro chords, off-time progressions and anti-melodies while oscillating between Norwegian shredding and sludgy bleakness. There is some really great stuff in here that few other bands are doing, and while I would have loved a little more low-end, I got over it and so will you.

PERILAXE OCCLUSION

Raytraces of Death 12-inch

[ B LO O D H A R V E S T ]

Coincidentally, this is another blackened death metal duo that also does the real fast and super-slow thing, and also has some off-time stuff. And while the riffs themselves may be more straightforward, they are really top-shelf. With twisty, finger-bending runs, this thing is filthy with hooks, and they even throw in some cello. There are three meaty songs here, but I could have gone double that. Oh, and they do have the necessary low-end.

URWELT

Distant Galaxies Collide 12-inch

[ S L E E P I N G G I A N T G LO SS O L A L I A ]

Two noise vets that have either worked with people you admire, or are admired by people you admire, have teamed up for this smorgasbord of all different kinds of racket. You got the big mass of churning distressing noise, the waves of electronics and drones, the harsh, erratic squalls… it’s all here. Four tracks in 40plus minutes, and unless your speakers are up to it, I would strongly suggest putting on headphones and just letting this carry you away.

DESOLAT

Songs of Love in the Age of Anarchy 12-inch [ B LO O D S H E D 6 6 6 ]

This is a picture disc, which we don’t see too many of around here, and I don’t love the visuals, but pretty much all picture discs are cool no matter what garbage they throw on there. As far as the music, this is like… crusty grunge? Is that a thing?

Has that ever been a thing? It’s like harsh vocals over thick, mid-paced rock, but sometimes it’s crusty D-beat and other times they just sound like some sort of punk band. And then the last song is then just a sludge track. Whatever this is, I honestly don’t completely hate it. I just am kind of baffled. So, get this if you like picture discs and being baffled.

DEATH TOLL 80K

TINES

[TO LIVE A LIE]

[ C H A N A M AT R O N I C ]

The Future Is Yours 12-inch

This is the kind of band where, when you hit the song that’s 2:14, it feels like you just stumbled on a sludge epic. It’s raw, Finnish punk grindcore where no way is this guy growling or screeching any of the purported lyrics, and you certainly don’t care. Nine songs in 11 minutes on this one-sided LP with a killer etching on the back.

Can’t think of any good reasons not to get this.

KNOW//SUFFER

“2 Song EP” 7-inch

Had I not known, I’d assume this was an early-’70s record rescued from a used bin. But it came out in 2020, and if you’re into hooky, keyboard-heavy throwbacks with a psychedelic bent, you’ll be just fine. Actually, the real tell is if you’re stoked to listen to a song called “Rock & Roll Witness Protection Program,” which I imagine will garner a lot of strong, immediate reactions on both sides.

DEAD NEANDERTHALS

The Great Dying 12-inch

“Rat Licker” 7-inch

[SILENT PENDULUM]

[UTECH/SAW-WHET]

And this puppy is also a one-sided 12-inch, this time with a silk screen on Side B. The music could have been pretty standard metalcore, but they’re trying their best to make it weird, with a lot of oddball changes, angular riffs and some off-kilter breakdowns that would give people in the pit vertigo. If you’ve sworn off metalcore, I’m not sure this will win you back, but if you’d like a little creativity injected into the genre, this is a thing to have.

There are an unprecedented eight labels listed for this record, so I just put the two American ones, and hoo boy, here we go. This is 12 songs from the Dutch band, and while their lineup changes often (as well as the instrumentation and genre), this is drums and saxophone just going hog fucking wild.

Most of the tracks are under a minute, and this is mostly a bunch of crazy noisy John Zorn shit that explodes, and then it’s over. They also have provided the best song title this month with the gem “Cop Meat.” I’ll let you figure out what to do.

DECIBEL : SEP TEMBER 2021 : 79

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

TO HELL WITH

YOUR “FUN” L

ife is full of meandering crossroads.

I used to own a record store that was equipped with a recording studio. Scott Kelly from Neurosis comes in to record and later asks to interview me on Combat Music Radio, his former podcast. That goes belly-up and a metal guitarist from Texas who read my book on fighting asks me to move my show to BloodyElbow.com where I can chat about mixed martial arts. He then spins off his show to the Let It Roll podcast, an exhaustive walk down any and every music lane.

And eventually, a brief and easy ask: Would you come on once every two weeks for the next season and do a show-by-show breakdown of Metal Evolution?

For those unfamiliar, it’s a film series where a Canadian guy does a lot of walking and eliciting of comments from everyone in metal that metal is good, harmless “fun” that’s just about “blowing off steam” and “having a good time.”

See, this is something that creeps into outsider movements often, either by way of an effort to monetize increased insider involvement or 80 : SEP TEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

just in a wholehearted belief that if things are not this way, things should be this way.

Fuck that.

Peanut butter is fun. So are bubble baths. And we can have a good time eating the former while taking the latter. However, there has never been a time when I feel I could comfortably say that my metal time has been any of those things.

What attracted me to metal initially—Deep Purple first, and then KISS (sorry, what do you expect from a 13-year-old?)—had nothing to do with any of those things. Look, the Gnostics generally refused to write things down because they figured that anything worth learning was going to have to be explained by someone who knew what was going on. It was an oral/ aural tradition, and in receiving hidden and mysterious knowledge, you became an initiate.

This was and should be, ideally, dangerous. That is, ideas are dangerous. That’s what drew me then and draws me still. Sure, it was a rough few years when hair metal started taking L’s to music that aided and abetted performers shooting

themselves and others in hip-hop, but this never altered my perception of metal being, at base root, dangerous.

Steep roller coaster dangerous.

Not necessarily San Quentin dangerous.

Even though, if truth be told, the best metal shows we’ve ever been to have been the ones where you could taste, feel, sense in the air that some shit was going to go down. Self-fulfilling prophecy style… Motörhead at Henry J. Kaiser in Oakland with Bad Brains and Discharge, if I haven’t totally lost my mind. Dio on the Holy Diver tour (though massive amounts of acid may have affected how this show was understood). And most recently—and while I know I have mentioned this before and I am tempted to apologize for mentioning it again, but I won’t—Slayer’s last show, also in Oakland.

These shows put the heavy in metal and defied the clownifying of metal in the midst of a convergence of very real danger both inside and outside of the venues, and more specifically in the message being delivered both consciously and subconsciously.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about what happened at a GG Allin show, again, in Oakland. He was late. The crowd was restless, edgy and, yeah, poised for the shit that, 30 minutes into waiting for GG, was clearly going to jump off.

Allin finally makes it to the stage. His guitarist at that point raises his arm, Pete Townsend-style, brings it down and hits his strings once. And it was ON. Can you name that song in one note? Nope, and no one could. But the club was destroyed in a flurry of fists, broken chairs and tables in a riot that spilled out into the streets.

And continued down the streets with store windows being smashed in.

People’s faces were a rictus of a lot of different emotions. But first and foremost, that I could see? Just a sort of crazed… joy. A joy in the shining beauty of destruction.

Which, now that I am remembering it, was pretty fun. But harmless? Not even a little.

So, add THAT to your feel-good documentary and remember: Danger is a drug to be feared and respected. Now, rock on.

ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

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