Decibel #205 - November 2021

ERIC WAGNER

1959 2021

MINISTRY NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH

FULL OF HELL DYING TO SOW THEIR SEEDS

REFUSE/RESIST

V E LI

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E V E W I

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Among the Living COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY HRISTO SHINDOV

upfront 8 obituary:

eric wagner Godspeed to a titan of doom

10 metal muthas Behind every frozen heart is a cold mother 12 news: postmortem I wonder if Kourtney shops there 14 live review:

psycho las vegas 2021 Decibel avoids COVID but can’t escape other self-harm at Psycho Las Vegas 2021

16 low culture Old man yells at cloud 17 no corporate beer Bury me in beer

features

reviews

40 mono Soul survivors

73 lead review Archspire cook up another course of prime cut tech death with Bleed the Future

20 inferi Certainly not a stabwound in the dark

30 dream unending Modern extreme metal’s dream team

22 the silver A kick from a rose

32 lamp of murmuur Sex and violence

42 churchburn Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s the hurry?

24 drott Lord of the cello

34 bastarður Love lost

44 full of hell Burning from the inside

26 snafu Waiting to die

36 mortiferum Beautiful decay

28 rivers of nihil Seasonal progression

38 helheim The vikings are housebound

46 q&a: ministry Al Jourgensen has a new set of teeth and a lot to chew on 50 the decibel

hall of fame We invite you for a laugh on Satan’s trampoline as we finally induct Lawnmower Deth’s debut LP into our hallowed Hall

74 album reviews Releases from bands that remember when Gary Holt hated the Kardashians well before Chris Barnes, including Cradle of Filth, Lucifer and the Melvins 88 damage ink Always hustling

18 in the studio:

eucharist

The new black

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.

ISSN 1557-2137 | USPS 023142 Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.

2 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

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REFUSE/RESIST

November 2021 [T205]

10)

9)

8)

7)

6)

5)

So no one has to watch another “all-star” metal band Zoom cover of a Thin Lizzy song because concerts are shut down again.

You’ll have yet another competitive advantage over Kirk Cousins and Carson Wentz.

So, instead of the usual reasons of being Nazis, misogynists or homophobes, I don’t have to learn that more artists that I once respected are anti-vax dipshits.

PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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Aaron Salsbury aaron@decibelmagazine.com

Michael Wohlberg

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Patty Moran

COPY EDITOR

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BOOKCREEPER

Tim Mulcahy

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CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Chuck BB, Ed Luce Mark Rudolph

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Online DECIBEL

WEB EDITOR

Albert Mudrian

DECIBEL

WEB AD SALES

James Lewis

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By this time next year, you’ll be really tired of only attending Madball, Chelsea Grin and Eric Clapton shows.

I won’t have a legitimate excuse to get the fuck away from you at a show when you inevitably punish me about why some record hasn’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

You can safely help Wino redirect the Jewish space lasers out of California.

4)

Deworming can then be a “personal choice” for you.

3)

You can return to thinking VAERS is just a shitty nü-metalcore band.

2)

You can finally stop “doing the research” and spend more time on uncovering the Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring controlling our politics and media.

1)

See page 8 of this issue.

Vince Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Louise Brown Chris Chantler Richard Christy Liz Ciavarella-Brenner John Darnielle Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Jonathan Horsley Courtney Iseman Neill Jameson Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Andrew Lee Shawn Macomber Shane Mehling Justin M. Norton Andy O'Connor Dutch Pearce Fred Pessaro Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Joseph Schafer Rod Smith Matt Solis Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky Bradley Zorgdrager CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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Jason Blake Ester Segarra Hristo Shindov Josh Sisk Gene Smirnov Levan TK Hannah Verbeuren Frank White

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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.

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I am exhausted. Tired of the willful ignorance, the craven selfishness and general fucking stupidity that has dominated the pandemic discourse over the last several months. Too weary to write another heavy-handed piece about why getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is the simple, responsible course to protecting yourself and everyone around you, because 1) who the fuck wants to read that, and 2) I’m not naïve enough to believe it would change the mind of any “free-thinkers.” So, instead, for “fun,” I present the Top 10 Reasons to Get Vaccinated.

READER OF THE

MONTH Exodus are on the cover of this issue.

With Slayer out of the picture, do you move Exodus into the “Big Four” of thrash?

Well, considering I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and Exodus is probably my favorite band, I say, without a doubt. Bonded

by Blood is the blueprint for thrash—period.

I don’t care how much of a die-hard you are; you’re gonna miss stuff, and that is where you guys come in.

Andy Ford

Los Angeles, CA Our admittedly spotty records indicate that you’ve been an active subscriber for 15 years. That’s over 180 issues! Aren’t you sick of us yet?

Has it been that long? No, I’m not sick of you guys! In fact, I look forward to each issue because I don’t care how much of a die-hard you are; you’re gonna miss stuff, and that is where you guys come in. It’s like having my own research team and, as you say, having been with you guys forever, I know I can trust you.

6 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

You’re a metal DJ in Los Angeles. Tell us how you got into that format and how our readers can hear you spin music.

Decibel returns to downtown Los Angeles for the first time since 2018 with our Metal & Beer Fest in December. You coming or what?

I was offered an internship at KNAC.com; having spent time in the Navy and running heavy equipment previously, it seemed like an opportunity to do something I really loved, as opposed to just earning a paycheck.

I now run my own station called Razor Radio, which you can listen to at www.razorradio.com.

I was at the two previous West Coast Metal & Beer fests; I am 99.9% certain that I will be at this year’s. I tell you, one thing that pissed me off during this whole pandemic mess was that I was ready to hit up the East Coast version [in Philadelphia in late September] and COVID fucked that all up! Hopefully someday I will make it back east for that.

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

OBITUARIES

ERIC

WAGNER 1 9 5 9 - 2 0 21 inspired and moved audiences around the world. His first and most important band, Trouble, played heavy metal rooted in the Birmingham soil tilled by Geezer, Tony, Ozzy and Bill, but were from the very beginning determined to build something new atop that ground—something heavier, something grander. Their 1984 debut, Psalm 9, hit the metal underground like a comet; people named bands after songs on it, and some of those people went on to carry the inspiration forward into new and vital directions.

Wagner left Trouble twice and returned twice; his other bands, Lid, Blackfinger and the Skull, pursued rewarding quests into further possibilities of doom, by turns psychedelic, epic and profound. ¶ Wagner’s dead now. He refused to get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, so he got sick and he died. He was 62. It’s hard to know who else he might have infected before he went, but it’s almost certainly a non-zero number; he was on tour when he tested positive. The audience that felt Trouble’s music hit the speed-obsessed metal world of 1984 like a slow-motion meteorite are all now in his age bracket: a little older, or a little younger, but getting on in years. It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be around to hear elder statesmen like Wagner still making great music, still reaching into the bowels of the cosmos and grabbing hold of the sludgy, gooey entrails. Still celebrating, interrogating and affirming life’s infinite complexities as only doom metal can. Still doing it.

But Eric Wagner won’t be doing it anymore, because he had to have his own fucking opinion about a matter of settled science—namely the efficacy of vaccines against viral spread. His death is pointless and deprives the metal world 8 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

of one of its most distinctive, restless voices.

The music that the Skull had been making offers ample, immediate proof that he had more to share, more to give, new hills to climb. Instead, he died on the hill of vaccine denial, one of the

a musical legacy that metal listeners will be mining for years to come; Trouble is one of those bands that just get better the more you listen to them, and this tends to hold true with Wagner’s post-Trouble bands, too. Some bands are content to make records that splash loudly when they hit the water and then sink, but Wagner, openly Christian, sought out gestures that would resonate in sound, to reverberate for years past their first hearing.

I’m a Christian, too. It’s incumbent on me, therefore, to forgive one of metal’s true luminaries for going out like a punk. Do I trust that he’s safe in the arms of God now? I do. Am I angry at what mindless go-your-own-way thinking has done and is doing during this pandemic?

At a man who leaves five children and seven grandchildren without a father and grandfather? I am. It’s important to stand up for your beliefs sometimes, and other times it’s important to listen to people who know better than you about what the prudent course of action is. Eric Wagner, whose music shaped the direction of metal in the 1980s and going forward, and whose work will endure, put the former before the latter. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 reads: Test all things; hold fast what is good. What’s good is to be alive and making music.

May he rest in peace. —JOHN DARNIELLE

PHOTO BY ALYSSA HERRMAN

FOR

37 years, Eric Wagner sang in bands whose music provoked, most moronic hills on Earth. He leaves behind

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

Well, here are the records that we spun most while successfully avoiding every Black Album cover released last month.

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

This Month's Mutha: Daciana Bârladeanu Mutha of Vlad the Inhaler of Persekutor

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Daciana Bârladeanu. I am workings for many years in hair salon that is also selling pork chops and loose cigarettes. Sometimes hair salon is having cock fights in back room, but not today.

Your son is impressively adept at speaking English. How instrumental were you in teaching him to be bilingual?

He is translatings this interview for me now, so I am teachings him nothings about English… but everythings about how to looks good at all times!

How proud were you when his first professional review was a perfect 10 in this magazine?

Well, he is tellings me about this but too bad album is never comings out. Many criminals is takings advantage of musician for moneys and sex favors. Lucky for Vladislav this situations is just moneys. As far as I am knowings.

and Van Halen, or were those records unavailable in his childhood?

I am listenings to Zamfir, Master of Pan Flute only backs in those days. He was handsome devil who is having his ways with all the babushkas.

As flute player, he is likings to see how they can blow! Not me though, I am givings him slappings of face and also testicles when he is tryings to get handsome with me at concert in Timisoara.

What was it like raising Vlad during the end of communism in Romania?

Romania is only country of Soviet Bloc where communism is endings with violence. We is endurings much but dictator dogs Ceausescus is payings with blood. After this, lifes is gettings better slowly but Vladislav is always more concernings with Scorpions tapes and Levi’s pantaloons and trying to make sexy time with girls at bus stop.

Do you share your son’s affection for meth?

Vlad is influenced by a lot of classic heavy metal.

Did you introduce him to the likes of Thin Lizzy 10 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

You mean fairy dust? Real men smokes Krokodil. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Trouble, Manic Frustration  Trouble, Trouble (1990)  Stormkeep, Tales of Othertime  Apparition, Feel  Catherine Wheel, Chrome ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Gorilla Biscuits, Start Today  Strife, Witness a Rebirth  Sepultura, Arise  Brandy, The Gift of Repetition  Knowso, Specialtronics/Green Vision ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten  Sentenced, Rotting Ways to Misery demo  Omnium Gatherum, Spirits and August Light  Anata, Under a Stone with No Inscription  Gehennah, Too Loud to Live, Too Drunk to Die ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Every Time I Die, Radical  The Red Chord, Clients  Perilaxe Occlusion, Raytraces of Death  Imperial Slaughter, ...Vile Slobs  Ghost Bath, Self Loather ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Neil Perry, Lineage Situation  Jerome’s Dream, Completed 1997-2001  A Trillion Barnacle Lapse, Selective Memory  Joshua Fit for Battle, To Bring Our Own End  Saetia, Collected

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------John Cooke : c o r r u p t m o r a l a lta r / n a pa l m d e at h

 Cloud Rat, “Mother You Get/ Glitter Belly”  Pig Destroyer, Pornographers of Sound: Live in NYC  Spazz, Crush Kill Destroy  Killing Joke, Pylon  Tobacco, Fucked Up Friends of Presence

POSTMORTEM

Storch began collaborating with two other associates, planning the new company’s first merch drop, which arrives in October. Among the designs included in the drop are merchandise from death metal OGs Obituary and Cannibal Corpse, which comes with some sentimental value.

“For our first drop, there’s going to be a Cannibal Corpse shirt that is the very first Cannibal Corpse shirt I ever got,” says the Postmortem co-owner. “It might not be the most iconic one, but it’s one that means the world to me.”

Quality and faithful recreation were extremely important to Postmortem when designing the merch, Storch tells Decibel. He stresses that the shirts are heavy-duty and meant to be worn, but they will not be mass-produced. Because of this, shirts from Postmortem will cost around $50 to $60.

Part of the work is having the shirt, but the other half is

YOU HAVE TO GO LIVE IN THIS SHIRT. NICK STORCH,

FOUNDER OF POSTMORTEM

Postmortem’s vintage metal shirt reproductions will preserve your expendable youth

DO

a quick eBay search for “vintage Morbid Angel shirt” and scroll

through the results. Nothing from the ’90s goes for less than $100, with one seller asking as much as $420 for a Domination tour longsleeve. On Instagram, collectors display obscure tapes and first-edition shirts from bands like Fleshcrawl, Gorefest and Dismember, sourced from around the world. The market for vintage merchandise is alive and growing, but the high cost can be prohibitive to would-be collectors—or even one-time purchasers—on the hunt for era-specific merchandise. ¶ Enter Postmortem Merchandise.

The new company, conceived by veteran metal booking agent Nick Storch, produces limited runs of old-school, out-of-print shirt designs. The shirts are chosen based on personal taste and then the idea is approved—or denied—by the band. ¶ Postmortem dates back to an idea Storch had years ago, after developing an interest in vintage T-shirt collecting. It moved to the back-burner as his career became more demanding, until the COVID-19 pandemic brought the live entertainment industry to a brutal halt.

12 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

There is plenty of collector appeal in the apparel that Postmortem produces due to the small number of units released and custom design of the shirts themselves. Once the shirts are sold out, they won’t be reprinted, so you’ll need to follow @postmortemshirts on Instagram for info on the company’s latest drops. Still, the industry veteran behind the company stresses that they aren’t selling museum pieces.

“Part of the work is having the shirt, but the other half is you have to go live in this shirt,” Storch asserts. “Go sweat in it, wash it a ton.

That’s what makes the vintage shirts so cool— they’ve been lived in, hard.”

At the end of the day, Postmortem is a labor of love. All three members who run the company have full-time jobs, so maintaining personal fulfillment is a requirement for the company to operate.

“It has to be about passion; it has to have meaning in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point?” asks Storch. “I don’t need more to do, but if I can recreate stuff that makes me happy and share that with other people, then that’s the win.” —VINCE BELLINO

PSYCHO LAS VEGAS

Two meters to midnight  Guitarist Commandor Vanik proves to be one of the few masked attendees at this year’s festivities

PSYCHO LAS VEGAS

STORY BY JEFF TREPPEL AND FRED PESSARO • PHOTOS BY LEVAN TK

H

elpful music festival travel tip: If you’re running really late for your Las Vegas, NV WHEN: August 20-22, 2021 plane, just wait for the next one instead of rushing to your gate, tripping and eating shit on a hard airport floor while loaded down with heavy bags, getting on the flight anyway because that’s how metal you are, realizing you can’t lift your arm above your shoulder upon trying to put your bags in the overhead bin, and winding up in an emergency room in Las Vegas where the doctor informs you that you have two broken ribs and a jacked-up rotator cuff.

WHERE: Mandalay Bay,

The funny thing is that you can’t really do much about those particular injuries (at least not immediately), so the ER doctor said I might as well go to Psycho Las Vegas, sling and (non-opioid) painkillers and all. I got there in time to catch Khemmis at the House of Blues, an excellent way to break my 18-month live music fast. Although they got off to a slow start thanks to technical difficulties (which led to a rad a cappella soundcheck of “Rainbow in the Dark”), their soothing rumble soon massaged my injured limbs with top-notch doom. King Dude had much more of a stage presence than one would expect from two guys with grandpa’s guitars, strumming through a set of both originals and covers of neofolk bands I’d never heard of in front of a haunting nature visualizer.

14 : NOV EMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

I then wandered over to the Main Stage for some Obituary. I’ve never been a big fan, but their caveman death metal really hit the spot this time. Even though the sun was down at this point, the Mandalay Bay Beach stage still sweltered as the Sword unleashed their stoner siege anthems across the sand. Mastodon on the Main Stage were poorly attended at first—there’s a one-to-one crossover between their audience and the Sword. Still, the arena filled in as they ripped through a set of some of their heaviest hits.

After Masto, I returned to my hotel to catch an early flight back home to my wife and cat the next morning—even vaxxed and masked, I decided I didn’t want to risk catching a certain nasty pulmonary disease while suffering from broken ribs. Luckily, Fred was there to pick up the slack. —JEFF TREPPEL

Deafheaven weren’t the first band on the bill on Saturday, but they were one of the few with a fresh album in tow—Infinite Granite, which hit shelves earlier that week. Despite that, the band focused on Ten Years Gone as their target: a barrage of greatest hits from prior records. Shortly after, Eyehategod headlined a packed room for their sludgy performance at the House of Blues, the band’s first gig in 18 months. Their August 21 appearance felt celebratory even though an undercurrent of sadness quietly permeated their set—the date would have been former drummer Joey LaCaze’s 50th birthday. In a rare showing, pioneering U.S. black metal band Profanatica packed the House of Blues with their unholy riffs and black prophecy.

Meanwhile, the outdoor stage at Mandalay Bay Beach was stacked with quite the quadruple jaw-dropper of a bill—Primitive Man, Pig Destroyer, Dying Fetus and Cannibal Corpse.

With a muscular lineup like that juxtaposed against the serene and beautiful setting provided by the pool, scantily clad attendees and the impending sunset, it’s no wonder the stage stayed packed for the duration of the evening—making way for tons of water-moshing and more. You simply have not lived until you have seen a Dying Fetus breakdown played in a pool and the ensuing chaos that follows.

(Not all) American psychos  (clockwise from top) Cult of Fire, Deafheaven, Exodus and Repulsion remind you there’s no running around the pool

Back indoors, Midwest post-hardcore favorites Cursive played a packed House of Blues from across their career in their second to last slot at House of Blues, leaning heavily on their seminal The Ugly Organ LP. The highly controversial and devastating Cult of Fire closed out the HOB, bringing their highly theatrical stage show all the way from the Czech Republic. Cult of Fire’s epic black metal felt like the right sort of goodbye to the evening, with the incredibly theatrical crew performing their eerie and memorable set while sitting at lecterns and atop striking cobras.

Sunday’s program started with maybe the most alarm clock-y song of all time, Integrity’s “Vocal Test.” Performing in the arena, the legendary metallic hardcore band ran through classics like “Those Who Fear Tomorrow,” “Hollow” and more to a coffee-guzzling crowd.

Directly following were Integrity’s Cleveland brethren Midnight, who commanded the large arena stage with the same force and delight that the trio would a dive bar. The band’s Motörhead/Venom-isms were punctuated with similarly ridiculous moves like leaps off full stacks and sprints across the stage during favorites like “Lust, Filth and Sleaze,” “Satanic

Royalty” and more. Later, the legends in Exodus would fight through technical difficulties to play classics like “Exodus,” “The Toxic Waltz” and more, all while roping in former guitarist Rick Hunolt. Though the band released a new single days before the festival, Exodus kept their set strictly old-school, dedicating the gig to drummer Tom Hunting, who is winning his fight with cancer (John Tempesta filled in).

Besides a brief stop to see a song or two by Glacial Tomb and Devourment, Immolation were the band that commanded more attention than any other at the House of Blues stage, nailing an airtight performance. The Yonkersbased NYDM legends flexed a new song called “Blooding” from their forthcoming Nuclear Blast LP while blazing through a catalog of absolute classics. By midday, festivalgoers were hit with the news that legendary singer Eric Wagner (of doom pioneers Trouble and the Skull) had died from COVID-19 complications, all the more shocking because the Skull were scheduled to play Psycho Swim just days before, but were forced to drop off last-minute due to Wagner’s illness. It’s proof that the dark shadow of this pandemic still looms despite the riff-filled escape from reality that Psycho managed to create.

Outside at the Mandalay Bay Beach, Weedeater were finishing up their set of stickyicky favorites like “God Luck and Good Speed.”

Playing on the elevated stage, the North Carolina band had the crowd wandering and splashing about at a slow tempo, only to be shocked back to life by Full of Hell’s breakneck speed and terrifying riffs. Full of Hell own every stage they play, and did so again Sunday before hundreds of people lounging, playing in the pool and enjoying the serenity of it all. Thee Oh Sees closed out the beach stage, bringing their pummeling dual drum attack with melodic garage to the masses.

Meanwhile, Drab Majesty and Repulsion batted cleanup at the House of Blues stage.

The secret ingredient to Psycho Las Vegas isn’t the lineup—it’s the prospect of seeing that lineup in a bizarre and free space, surrounded by every amenity under the sun and with a freedom not available at most festivals. The ability to come and go as you please is crucial, and aids in the overall enjoyment of the weekend, instead of slogging from set to set for a band you’re dying to see, but would enjoy a hell of a lot more if you could just take a seat. It’s an idea that should be basic, but is almost revolutionary—or maybe just plain psycho. —FRED PESSARO DECIBEL : NOV EMBER 2021 : 15

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

Halloween Is Not a Personality Trait etting old sucks, right? I mean,

there’s a lot about it that’s just fucking miserable. People you came up with change into unrecognizable strangers who drift away into some weird new lifestyle you can’t really meld with (mostly family, religion or—in the worst cases—politics). That person might even be you, and that’s why your old friends have left you alone. Some people remain stunted, suspended in a strange time-freeze where they still believe they’re in fucking high school and that’s how life is going to be forever. You know the type—the ones who constantly quote Ferris Bueller like it’s some goddamn great work of philosophy on the level of Being and Time. These are the same people who spout platitudes like “it’s all metal!” and have the taste of a fucking 7-year-old in every aspect of their lives.

Another drag is all the new problems you’ll have with your body, especially if you’ve spent years being hard on it like many of us have.

I was in the hospital last month with kidney stones. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced—until they administered fentanyl.

Then it turned into one of the most oddly beautiful encounters of my life, which I guess is how prog rock was born in the ’70s. Anyway, for the last five weeks I’ve been seeing a urologist because I had multiple stones in the pipeline, and every time that I was in the waiting area, my thoughts drifted to how I was the youngest person there—until I remembered I was 43 and this is how the second chapter of my life is going to play itself out.

I apparently pissed all of the stones out thanks in part to a massive change in lifestyle— and also the drug Flomax, which helped me drop over 25 pounds. Take a second to look up Flomax’s side effects, because I had every single one.

16 : NOV EMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

You’ll notice one in particular, which is why I just assigned that homework.

But the worst—and the impetus of this month’s complaints—is being greeted with the news of someone you know who stopped being a citizen of Earth. I’ve experienced two since just the last column: Mathias, who was Krieg’s first European driver for two tours and a goddamn gem of a human being, and Paulie, a customer of my old record store who I’d hang out with at shows. Both of them died before the age of 50.

It’s been a little over a year since Thomas Reitmayer’s passing. Thomas was one of the first people to believe in me as a writer and helped mentor me through the process. He died way too young. I could go through a fucking dozen more who died in the last few years, and I wouldn’t even scratch the surface. And it’s only going to increase the older I get, until I’m one of the people being written about, though I doubt anyone will ever accuse me of “lighting up a room.”

It’s not all bad, though. Despite the depressing shit I’ve spent 500 words rambling about, there are a lot of good things about aging if you’re doing it right. You continue to amass new experiences and approach them with a perspective that only someone who’s been through it can have. If you’ve avoided that stupid cliché that, after 30, you stop listening to new music or seeking out new art, life can continually be surprising and—dare I say it—pleasurable.

You’ve realized that just because you’ve stopped moving doesn’t mean the rest of the world has, and the moment you make peace with that is the moment you start to move again—just differently. Take time to remember the people who have left and take time to remember the person you were. But don’t take too much time—the world will pass you by.

A Guide to Metal in the Taproom With Burial Beer

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recently visited the Asheville, NC taproom of Burial Beer, a brewery I’ve long admired due to its balanced IPAs, complex stout and metal-leaning artwork. A solid playlist of doom metal peacefully coexisted with families toasting at picnic tables, and it struck me: Burial seems to have figured out how to incorporate its true metal self into the brewery’s experience without sacrificing accessibility. So, I asked co-founder Tim Gormley about Burial’s metal component and how to successfully soundtrack your taproom with the genre.

On your website, Burial’s meaning is linked to ideas of life, death and the afterlife.

This is reflected in artwork that also happens to have some metal vibes to it. Is this intentional, is there any element of metal in Burial’s DNA?

[Co-founders] Doug and Jess [Reiser] previously lived in New Orleans, and the concept was born from both the famous aboveground tombs of the city and its jazz funeral.

Once we all committed to the name Burial, I was given some freedom to propose visual artists that could potentially drive our brand aesthetic into the future. Partially due to what I was listening to at the time, I discovered the work of David Paul Seymour and I felt very inspired by it. I approached David about designing some beer labels for us… and we’ve been working with him ever since.

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Resting place  Tim Gormley (r) ensures that Burial Beer is infused with only the heaviest of metals... well, not literally

Visiting the Asheville space, some great metal was playing at a chill volume.

What’s the general sort of approach for music played at the taprooms and the atmosphere it creates?

When you produce a carbonated liquid for a living, certain senses are innately tied to your consumers’ experience. Undeniably, we cover smell and taste. Beyond what a cold can or glass might feel like in your hand, we put a lot of effort into the way our beverages interact with your mouth from a textural perspective. We’ve touched upon the sights that David provides. So, we are left with sound.

The easiest way for us to control that piece is through the taproom experience.

I’ve said it many times before and I’ll continue to say it until I die—you will always be most successful doing the things you are most passionate about. We are passionate about psychedelic music above all else.

That can mean a lot of things, but for us it’s music that has an atmosphere to it that draws you in with its gravity, bequeaths its weight to you and spits you back out with a deeper understanding.

What kind of considerations might you make when playing certain music in the

taproom? Are you looking for things that will still feel sort of… palatable?

To some degree, any success we’ve seen comes from a place of being unapologetically ourselves. We embrace that, but extreme, screamy vocals tend to be the most abrasive part of metal music to non-fans. Most often we play stoner/doom and more rock ‘n’ rollleaning metal like Graveyard, Witchcraft, Uncle Acid, Pallbearer, Windhand, Ruby the Hatchet. And, of course, you can’t ever go wrong with some of the classics people recognize, like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Thin Lizzy.

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What are five bands, albums or specific songs that scratch the metal itch, but are perfect for playing at the taproom?

A melancholic, but goosebump-induced candle ceremony intro with Forndom’s “Jakten” seamlessly transitioned into “Half Breed”

by Big | Brave, moving into the southern, bluesy soulful sounds of “Forget You” by Royal Thunder, then break it down with some OG blues metal mastery with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” followed by an appropriately timed bong rip lead into Sleep’s “Marijuanaut’s Theme.” From there, we simply ride the crazy train full of Sabbath worshippers and weedians off to the riff-filled land.

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EUCHARIST

STUDIO REPORT

EUCHARIST

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he last time Markus Johnsson—founding member/

creative force of Swedish death metal legends Eucharist—stepped into a proper studio, the Hale-Bopp ALBUM TITLE Comet was roaring eerily in the night sky. A portent I Am the Void of things to come, perhaps, but just as quickly as Hale-Bopp LABEL and Mirrorworlds—the 1997 follow-up to breakout debut A Velvet Regain Creation—appeared, both vanished in the eternal blackness of PRODUCER metaphorical and physical space. Fast forward 24 years (give or Markus Johnsson take), and Johnsson has emerged without longtime drummer (Johnsson’s Daniel Erlandsson (Arch Enemy) to give his perpetually on/off home studio, Norrtälje, Sweden) again labor of love another shot at infamy.

RECORDING DATES “I recorded everything but drums at my home studio,” Fall 2015, Johnsson says. “The drums were recorded in Germany without Spring 2016, stress—no deadlines as such—during spring 2021. We [Johnsson Spring 2021 and then-drummer Erlandsson] didn’t even have a label by the RELEASE DATE time we started the album. That’s why the sessions were laidMarch 2022 back, sober, drunken, energetic, fun, serious—it was a sincere pleasure to create this album.”

New album I Am the Void started all the way back in 2015. Johnsson and Erlandsson rekindled the flame by performing a one-off show [Metal Reunion PTD3] before ghosting once more. Behind the scenes, Johnsson was writing songs that would continue where tracks like “Dissolving” and “March

of Insurrection” left off, but wrapped in an entirely new, extremely nihilistic skin.

“I would call this music straightforward, old-school black metal with a touch of old Eucharist,” says Johnsson. “It is dark and sinister compared with the earlier material—the entire album has an atmosphere that I’m indeed pleased with. What can I say? People change over time and, as you mentioned, 24 years has passed; so, naturally, the music has developed alongside with me, and at the end of this road you will find that the album is 100 percent Eucharist. To be honest, this album is my absolute proudest artistic achievement in life so far.”

I Am the Void is officially in the bag. The studio sessions—spread across the ages—were helmed, honed and heroed to completion by Johnsson. Whether we’ll have to wait another lifetime for the follow-up is anybody’s guess, but at the very least, Eucharist have returned.

Post tenebras lux. —CHRIS DICK

STUDIO SHORT SHOTS

RECENTLY RELAPSED RIPPED TO SHREDS READY RECORD OF RIGHTEOUS RAGERS Ironically, when we catch up with Ripped to Shreds’ Andrew Lee to discuss the progress of album number three, it’s only been a few hours since news broke that his band put pen to Relapse’s paper.

“The deal came together super fast,” Lee explains. “It was done between April and June. I finished writing the record at the end of July; because we use a click and I program all the drums, it doesn’t matter what order we record in. Plus, we

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do it in my home studio where there’s a fair amount of gear and we can get pretty decent quality.”

In addition to shacking up with Relapse, the biggest difference between the forthcoming album and previous offerings of their Bay Area death metal is that the LP will be a band effort instead of a Lee-helmed, lone wolf studio project.

“I brought [drummer] Brian and [bassist] Ryan on as full members last year, and they’re going to be playing on the new record,” Lee elaborates. “Right now they’re polishing up their parts and getting ready to record. I’ve already recorded all the rhythm and lead guitars.

Now I’m just working on getting good vocal takes.” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

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INFERI

INFERI

Prolific Southern tech gentlemen take one step towards their “epitaph”

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hen someone says they’re waiting for the follow-up to Epitaph, anyone familiar with tech-death rolls their eyes so hard they may never see the smooth neck of a fretless bass again. Malcolm Pugh has accepted that he’ll never hear Necrophagist’s third album, so discussions of the next Epitaph are more metaphorical. ¶ “No one expected that. It just took tech-death in a different direction,” reasons the guitarist. “I think we’re all waiting for the next Epitaph that changes the genre. I think there’s another one on the horizon.” ¶ With any luck, that horizon crested on September 10, when the Nashville quintet unleashed fifth LP Vile Genesis. It’s their fourth release in as many years, a streak including 2018’s Revenant and last year’s Of Sunless Realms EP. ¶ Both releases were necessary for Vile Genesis’, well, genesis. The former descended through Dante’s Inferno, separating this new LP from conceptual prequel The Path of Apotheosis. The latest nods back via melodic motif, while lyrically wrapping the story of alien civilization Anunnaki, who created then-abandoned humans. Unfortunately, the earthlings awaken their progenitor, who sets out to destroy what he created by using man-made creations. Pugh points to social media’s control as an underlying message, 20 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

but also geeks out on more fantastical elements: “I feel like I’m having a nerd conversation at a [Warhammer] 40K convention.”

There’s as much musical nuance as a finely painted mini figure, focusing on synths over Revenant’s orchestrations and technicality with purpose. “It’s not just like, ‘Turn everything on 11 and let it go,’” reveals the guitarist. “It’s closer to the direction I’m happiest with, which is very atmospheric and melodic, yet still technical and heavy.”

Inferi are flagbearers of techdeath and more than just figureheads of tastemaking label the Artisan Era—they’re the legitimate leaders of the imprint. Unfortunately, Pugh and co-guitarist Mike Low’s positions at the top mean they’re essentially an independent band. They had to get creative when COVID pulled the rug out from under album-financing touring plans.

Fortunately, the prolific outfit had five songs not-quite-ready for the LP, which they’d release as Of

Sunless Realms. The process took a mere six weeks from idea to fruition (Pugh half-jokes that Vile Genesis might’ve been better if they’d applied that time to polishing its songs) and its rollout led producer Dave Otero to quip that he’s never had a band release a single while recording. The producer’s background behind the skins pushed the LP’s more percussive elements—notably Spencer Moore’s drumming, complemented by Andrew Kim’s bass and Stevie Boisier’s vocal patterns.

Otero’s experience with diverse genres also helped. In recent years, he’s touched Cattle Decapitation’s grinding yet melodic death, Khemmis’ doom and Akhyls’ black metal.

This complements his tech-death mastery well. In fact, the album he did right after Vile Genesis was Archspire’s, whom Inferi “iced” with 200 bottles of Smirnoff vodka coolers hidden all over Westminster, CO’s Flatline Audio. A funny prank between friends, or a play to edge ahead in the tech-death race? Maybe a bit of both. —BRADLEY ZORGDRAGER

THE SILVER

THE SILVER

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ilver is one of seven transformative metals of old. Representative of both the moon (an interstitial between white and black) and purity/intuition (the divine feminine), the ever-versatile metal is an apt nom de guerre for the Silver, a new band featuring Crypt Sermon’s Enrique Sagarnaga (drums), Horrendous brothers Matt and Jamie Knox (respectively, vocals/guitars and bass), and newcomer Nick Duchemin (vocals).

Congregated in 2018 out of an unco fever dream, the Silver’s initial mission wasn’t to replicate or expand upon the collective’s mainstays, but to ferry away from them—in addition to the trappings of the genres they populate. ¶ “The minute we started talking about the Silver, it was more than a side project,” says Matt Knox. “It wasn’t just something that we’d end up doing for fun outside of our other work. We wanted it to stand on its own, be its own beast and find its own voice. We had pretty big plans from the beginning.” ¶ Musically, the Silver occupy a space unorthodox. There are vestiges of Norwegian explorers In the Woods..., Ved Buens Ende and Fleurety on one side, 22 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

while on the other the brew is stranger. Sparks of NWOBHM greats dance decorously in the pale moonlight with the discord of Abigor and the strands of punk-goth In Solitude left behind.

“From the beginning, Enrique was adamant that we weren’t a black metal band,” Knox continues. “The roots are there, but from there, black metal was abandoned after that. There’s a swirl of influences just between the two of us.

When the rest of the guys [Jamie and Nick] came into the band, the influences affecting us were a lot deeper. I think, in the end, the music is intentionally beautiful or gothic or romantic. I definitely don’t consider those things when I’m writing music outside of the Silver.”

From the striking Paul Romano cover art and the personal heft/ charm imbued into the lyrics to

the brotherhood of the project, there’s a sense of devotion to the Silver’s debut album Ward of Roses (Gilead Media). Indeed, “Fallow,” “Vapor,” “Then Silence…” and the title track profoundly visualize the chasm between agony and bliss via through V-shaped motifs, mellifluous passages, solicitous drumming and some of the most tortured vocals ever put to tape.

“We had a vision for the record,” concludes Knox. “Hearing how it turned out is so much bigger than we could’ve ever imagined. The process was cathartic, but it moves me in a way that no other project does in the same way. The other stuff I do is more larger-than-life.

The Silver is more introspective, emotionally strong and beautiful.

The emotions and feelings we were going for really do come through.

They’re trapped [inside] the recording.” —CHRIS DICK

PHOTO BY SCOTT KINKADE

Philly death and doom musicians take a shine to avant-garde black metal

DROTT

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ext year marks the 20th anniversary of Arve Isdal manning lead guitar for Enslaved. Forced to choose a highlight, he cites Isa in 2004, which began a run-up to the Bergen prog institution’s first Norwegian Grammy, with co-founders Grutle Kjellson and Ivar Bjørnson holding down bass and guitar respectively and our man wielding his own axe. Cohabitating with the latter, Isdal counted membership in a dozen bands, so the former dubbed him “Skjevo” (translating as “a piece of bread”) because he always carried a bag of sandwiches from rehearsal to rehearsal. ¶ Onto this menu Isdal adds three-piece Drott. Alongside drummer Ivar Thormodsæter (Ulver) and cellist Matias Monsen, the shreddist once credited as Ice Dale laid the groundwork for his latest side act over time, but they only began jamming in January 2020. After an introductory EP this March, now arrives debut full-length Orcus, Roman God of the underworld and namesake for a predominantly instrumental work of progressive finesse.

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“The mythology concerning Orcus appeals to us in our current sonic experimentations,” emails Isdal.

“It’s hard to tell which came first, the music or the narrative. It sort of grew on each other in the process of making Orcus. Drott is an old Norse name for ruler or lord, and we found it a bit exotic to mix Nordic and Mediterranean elements.”

“Caerdroia” layers cello in an album dynamic that often makes Monsen’s bowing lead instrument, but “The Marauders” rides a rising siege of lashing percussion and bleeding strings. “The Strait” evokes 1990s instrumental discs from Steve Howe, Steve Morse and Joe Satriani, dedicated to texture and tone.

“Now that you mention it, I see what you mean,” writes Isdal.

“I had Joe Satriani albums and learned some of the songs, and I’ve always been a big fan of Steve Howe and especially his choice of notes

and scales. Both Matias and I use a lot of sequencing chords that open up very different tonalities and soundscapes. This isn’t unusual in hard rock where you move riffs up and down a minor third, or in black metal where you take a minor chord up and down a half step.”

The title track roils an epic battle between cello and guitar even though Norway taught the metalosphere that the two fuse together famously. According to Isdal, “We’ve only started to explore the symbiosis between the cello and guitar in Drott, where we feel like adventurers because there’s a door that suddenly opens when we play. I remember telling a friend I thought I knew how it must have felt for a band like Led Zeppelin, who had an insane musical chemistry. Of course, I would never compare myself with them, but still…” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

PHOTO BY JENS KRISTIAN

DROTT

Say cello to Norwegian black metal legends’ progressive soundtrack

SNAFU

Detroit hardcore punk madmen thrash as the world burns

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umerous band monkers across the metalsphere aptly describe the misery we’ve endured since early 2020, but Motor City hardcore-thrashers SNAFU have the competition beat: The slang military acronym of ‘Situation Normal: All Fucked Up’ hits the nail right on the virus-riddled head. ¶ “This past year has been absolutely disheartening, to say the least,” begins vocalist/guitarist Scott Curnow. “Despite how tremendous and horrific the issues we were faced with [were], I feel we could have easily overcome them if we would have just all banded together and fought them head-on as decent human beings. But unfortunately, as we all know, it went the opposite direction. One of the general themes of SNAFU has always been our disgust of the human race. [Humanity’s] lost any sort of connection to the spirit and Mother Nature. We’re selfishly absorbed in ourselves and useless materials. We’ve devolved into a disease-like growth on the Earth, and one day we will destroy it and ourselves.” ¶ While waiting for our inevitable collective demise, then, do something commendable like circle-pitting to SNAFU’s third and best LP, Exile//Banishment. One moment you’ll be accosted by prime Trap Them shit-kickin’, only to be 26 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

completely sideswiped by a riff seemingly from the infernal hand of Hanneman. Elsewhere, Disfearworthy D-beat ‘n’ roll, blasts of crossover thrash akin to Iron Age, nasty death metal syncopations and even screeds of black metal all jostle for supremacy.

“If anything, we really just got a little older, fatter and dumber than we were on the last album,” jokes the other half of SNAFU’s guitar/ vocal attack, Rian Staber. “No, but in all seriousness, we’re always pushing ourselves to be better musicians. When asked about how much our style has developed over the years, we always tell the truthful joke about how we started as angry young punks that just happened to get better at our instruments and thus naturally progressed into a more ‘thrash’ sound.”

Just before the world shat itself, SNAFU took their latest evolved tranche of tracks to Richmond, VA, to record with twin terrors Philip “Landphil” Hall (Municipal Waste, Cannabis Corpse, Iron Reagan) and

Josh “Hallhammer” Hall (Cannabis Corpse). Daily sessions took between eight and 12 hours, and the fourpiece blew off stress by raging with members of Waste, GWAR and Enforced—and one night even drank the entire bar menu at the Cobra Cabana. The nightly craic peaked when Power Trip and High on Fire rolled through town, though.

“We went to that show to party with the PT dudes and got completely smashed,” Curnow recalls.

“We stumbled into Josh and Phil’s apartment that night and told them we’d like to start the next day’s session a little bit later. Next thing we knew, we’re opening our eyes and Josh is like, ‘Hey guys, let’s get going.’ We all got up in a hazy blur, splashed our faces with cold water and headed to the studio. Once we got there, someone goes, ‘Dude, it’s 6:45 a.m. right now.’ I feel like that might have been on purpose to punish us, but we pushed through the hangover and banged out a really productive day!” —DEAN BROWN

PHOTO BY BRIAN SHEEHAN

SNAFU

RIVERS OF NIHIL

RIVERS OF NIHIL Rising PA prog-death crew trains hard, remains on the rails with fourth LP

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he first interview Rivers of Nihil did about the album that became The Work was a mere half-year after acclaimed LP Where Owls Know My Name dropped with a bombshell: They might ditch the saxophone in favor of a more raw, noisy and dissonant approach. That would be befitting of The Work, which closes out their season quadrilogy with winter—weather associated with frigid black metal, itself raw and dissonant. Somehow, they ramped up the nastiness, yet maintained a textural sax and expanded progressive elements, even flirting more with their rockier side. ¶ Guitarist Brody Uttley explains how that’s the true essence of winter, despite that description sounding less frigid. “We wanted to create the heavier moments to be more like the landscape of the album cover and the warmer moments to be like if you were to enter the cabin to take refuge inside,” says the Pennsylvanian songwriter, who has no doubt warmed up by a fire with a hot drink. “That’s kind of how winter is—it’s brutal, noisy and horrible at times, but every now and then you can take shelter, warm back up and get ready to go back out.”

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A song like “Dreaming Black Clockwork” and its ending noise crescendo represents a blizzard’s oppressive force. For this critical part of the album, Uttley captured random sounds on tour, such as a rattling ice machine in a green room. This “sound world” was kicked into overdrive when the quintet was home due to the pandemic (they’d planned to be home writing for most of 2020, regardless). The sound clips started to tell a story.

Uttley recalls running outside to record the Reading Train, which chugs through their hometown of the same name, and, now, their record. He also visited abandoned warehouses—memories of the city’s once thriving industry—where he and a friend hit, dropped and rattled anything they found. His favorite track, “Focus,” is built on a looping beat he programmed using these elements, truly embracing a progressive spirit. The soaring chorus is a huge bonus.

Vocalist Jake Dieffenbach experiences the music as his band composes it; yet, even hearing it in increments, he discovers something new every listen. “I feel it’s so wellbalanced,” he says. “It’s obviously a metal record, but there’s a good balance with everything else in there that you kind of forget for a second or two that you’re listening to a metal record.”

You might forget you’re listening to a Rivers of Nihil record, too.

Past records tell the story of a solar flare wiping out much of humanity, forcing survivors beneath a nowuninhabitable earth’s surface. The last LP closed with the planet’s final survivor passing after thousands of years. That leaves The Work stuck, remarkably, more in the real world.

“The title itself represents the time and effort we put into this band from the beginning up until now,” explains Dieffenbach. “It equally reflects the currency of life, like having to put in time to get something out of it.” —BRADLEY ZORGDRAGER

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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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XYTHLIA

IMMORTALITY THROUGH QUANTUM SUICIDE Translation Loss is excited to announce the vinyl reissue of XYTHLIA’s crushing debut record “Immortality Through Quantum Suicide”.

An epic collision of tech-death, grind and hardcore that is equal parts face melting as it is soul devouring. Mastered for Vinyl by Nick Stanger of XYTHLIA and features the gorgeous art of Carlos Agraz (Teeth, Uthullun).

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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 Grief!

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OUR PLACE OF WORSHIP IS SILENCE This Never Happened

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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.

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DREAM UNENDING

DREAM UNENDING Atmospheric doom-death duo dreams big on dynamic debut

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ream unending, a new band featuring Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore, isn’t what you’d expect. While the duo’s main outfits are unadulterated, devastatingly good death metal, their new collaboration has more in common with the Peaceville Three and early-stage Septic Flesh. That is to say, Dream Unending’s doom-infused death is less about FromSoftware monsters and anxiety disorders set against cataclysmic and maudlin pandemonium. The group’s Arthur Rizk-mixed/mastered debut, Tide Turns Eternal (20 Buck Spin), punctures inner turmoil and strife to end reflective and hopeful, all set to heartbreaking leads, spectral interludes, impenetrable riffs and otherworldly vocals. ¶ “I guess sometime shortly after the release of Punishment in Flesh by Innumerable Forms is when I reached out to Justin,” says Vella, who also moonlights in the gruesomely good Outer Heaven. “That was 2018. I remember seeing them back in 2010 in Toronto, and was a fan of the demo prior to the gig. It was one of the only groups I knew at that time doing the Finndeath thing. I got his email contact and dropped him a line.

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I introduced myself. He liked Tomb Mold. From there, we connected over gigs we’ve been at without knowing each other dating back to 2005; me the spectator and him usually the performer. He had pitched me on wanting to do a doom band, which I think I found strange since he already had one—so to speak.

We quickly outlined a set of rules and went from there.”

One of the rules: Dream Unending couldn’t be a side project, but a proper band. The duo had spent far too much time conceptualizing and writing what would be Tide Turns Eternal for it to be fugacious.

Other bylaws included understated, if critical lessons from My Dying Bride, Anathema and Paradise Lost.

Early on, Vella and DeTore had instilled in Dream Unending that there are no boundaries. As long as the journey is from the heart, then it’s meant to be. Freedom to cast heavily and express mournfully can be heard explicitly in “In Cipher I Weep,” “Forgotten Farewell,” “Dream Unending” and

the title track. But the overarching atmosphere enunciated by Tide Turns Eternal had its origins elsewhere.

“I’d say the atmosphere is definitely built by a lot of influences outside of doom,” Vella explains.

“Pink Floyd and the Cure for sure.

Other goth stuff from the ’80s, a lot of 4AD artists, especially the Cocteau Twins. A lot of those singleline melodies make me think of the Chameleons. Stuff like My Bloody Valentine as far as filling in space with sound. It was also the result of getting lost in records I was listening to a lot. For instance, in the summer and autumn of finishing the final rewrites of the songs and adding everything extra, I was listening to Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson and No Other by Gene Clark nearly every night while sitting outside. They really helped shape things in my mind. I think Justin and I wanted the album to feel immersive. A vision quest of sorts.

I’m not sure if it’s doom-death or funeral doom. We jokingly just call it dream-doom.” —CHRIS DICK

TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD.

MONO Pilgrimage of the Soul The legendary Japanese instrumental rock band infuses their well-established interplay of whisper quiet to devastatingly loud with mesmerizing electronic textures and surprising new tempos and rhythms.

EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY Big Bend (An Original Soundtrack for Public Television) Explosions In The Sky’s first release in 5 years is a euphoric soundtrack for this PBS Nature documentary.

ELUVIUM Virga II The second chapter in the beloved ambient music series by Eluvium, built from generative music and long-format looping.

MOGWAI As The Love Continues The Scottish icons return with their first new album in four years, continuing to offer solace from the mundane.

MONO Beyond the Past • Live in London with the Platinum Anniversary Orchestra MONO’s massive 20th anniversary concert backed by a full orchestra on this intensely special limited release.

ENVY The Fallen Crimson Japan’s most iconic and influential post-hardcore band returns with their first new album in five years.

Released in the UK/EU by Pelagic Records.

EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY How Strange, Innocence Anniversary Edition Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the birth of Explosions In The Sky with this exquisitely remastered, repackaged reissue.

WILLIAM BASINSKI Lamentations Transforming operatic tragedy into abyssal beauty, the tape loop pioneer has crafted his most mournful work since The Disintegration Loops.

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LAMP OF MURMUUR

LAMP OF MURMUUR Prolific USBM upstart continues to evolve without abandoning the riff

M.,

the man behind Lamp of Murmuur, declares latest album Submission and Slavery, “a vulgar, yet somehow pompous and menacing opus of unorthodox black metal.” Among the many luminaries of modern raw black metal, Lamp of Murmuur occupies a unique space, blending his dedication to the old gods with his love of goth and death rock. According to M., “on this new album, that aspect of my music has been taken to a whole new level” along with “some glimpses of old heavy metal and hard rock.”

This is definitely true of the fist-pumping bridge on “Deformed Erotic Visage” and pseudo-title track “Reduced to Submission and Slavery.” ¶ In creating this new album, M. has continued to let intuition and improvisation be his guides, the only difference here being that “songs were written and recorded in three different months, so one can perceive how different my mindset and the influences were at the time the moment I pressed ‘record.’” For many underground black metal fans, M.’s art connects to something primal, pure and almost innocent, 32 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

and on Submission and Slavery, the project’s core sound is fully intact: catchy synths and oceans of chorus effects.

Thematically speaking, the album “deals with both psychological and physical pain that originates from traumatic sexual experiences.”

He adds that, “Rape is not an uncommon theme in extreme music in general—be it goregrind or noise music, artists have songs and albums entirely dedicated to sexual abuse and violence—but often as a mere shock gimmick and sometimes almost an exaggerated ‘comical’ approach.” M. was determined to take a thoroughly serious approach to his subject matter.

In this way, you might imagine Submission and Slavery coming from the mind of Justine or one of the other unfortunate souls we find in the work of the Marquis de Sade. M. elaborates: “The guilt, the

punishment and the seemingly never-ending pain that accompany such traumatic events—mind and flesh constantly spiraling to a realm of absolute torment, to find themselves twisting in the depths of self-deprecation with no evident escape route. I feel all those moments of hopelessness, lamentation and sometimes even an uncontrollable anger and disgust have been aptly represented in the record.”

In summing up the new album, M. says that “despite it being shorter than its predecessor,” Submission and Slavery is “a labyrinthine record full of unexpected twists and turns.

The atmosphere is one of absolute drama, melancholy and grief in contrast to the rabid madness that was Heir of Ecliptical Romanticism, but the main focus will forever be the same: riff-driven black metal.” It’s nice to have something good to count on in this world. —J. ANDREW ZALUCKY

BASTARÐUR

Sólstafir mainman puts down the cowboy hat, straps on the battle vest

A

ðalbjörn “addi” tryggvason ought to be no stranger to regular Decibel readers—as the accomplished vocalist and guitarist of Sólstafir, he’s been one of Iceland’s mostexported musicians as far as metal is concerned. Even so, Bastarður, his latest project, might surprise even his most dedicated fans. Whereas Sólstafir traffic in lush, post-rock-affected black metal, Bastarður deliver anthemic D-beat songs soaked in chainsaw death metal tones on debut album Satan’s Loss of Son. ¶ Tryggvason is no stranger to the ugliest side of rock ‘n’ roll, though his earlier dabblings in this style never bubbled up to the greater underground. “Between 1990 and 1993, I was in death metal bands, but it never reached any sort of professional point,” he explains. “There never came any Left Hand Path out of that, but we were for sure very influenced by the Swedes, just as we were with the Americans with Deicide and Autopsy. The real big thing is that I was always a huge Entombed fan, even their side projects the Hellacopters or Murder Squad.

So, let’s just say I got into this kind of music 30 years ago.

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But, this kind of music, let’s say, like modern-day Disfear and Wolfbrigade, didn’t really exist back then.”

Though the project is also rooted in Terrorizer and Autopsy as far as tone and aesthetic, Disfear, as it turns out, were instrumental in Tryggvason’s decision to double down on D-beat as an organizing principle. “I was in punk bands between 2002 and 2006, Hrafnathing and Bölvun,” he adds. “I played drums in both bands. During that time, I got into Disfear, and my love for that band only increased through the years. That love then reached a climax when I saw them play at Roadburn in 2017. In October 2018, I was in between homes and lived with my parents for a while, so I set up a studio in my dad’s garage and started to write riffs; and I did that for six months, until I had an album of material.”

Those six months resulted in a little over a half-hour of righteous

riffs, choruses and pure aggression stripped of any atmospheric pretense—all performed by Tryggvason and drummer Birgir “Biggi” Jónsson. The record was recorded in 2019, around the same time Sólstafir were preparing their Endless Twilight of Codependent Love album. Tryggvason intended to unveil Bastarður first, but COVID-related delays kept the project under wraps until now.

But don’t mistake Tryggvason’s patience for indifference—just as he’s a serious scholar of the HM-2, he’s dedicated to keeping Bastarður alive in tandem with Sólstafir. “We already have a live lineup ready in the bunker, and we are all very excited for the first rehearsal. We have all known each other for a long time, and most of us have played together in different bands and adventures. I only intend to sing when we perform live. This is for sure not a one-off. I feel this is only the beginning—this is too much fun to do.” —JOSEPH SCHAFER

PHOTO BY RUNAR HRODI GEIRMUNDSSON

BASTARÐUR

MORTIFERUM

MORTIFERUM

T

here’s something rotten in the state of Washington.

Exhibit A: the Olympia quartet Mortiferum. The band was formed in 2016 by a trio of Evergreen College alumni. Max Bowman and Chase Slaker played crusty deathgrind guitars in Bone Sickness, and when that fell through, they formed deathgrind project Caustic Wound, then Mortiferum with fellow Greener Alex Mody on drums and bassist Tony Wolfe. In Mortiferum, they pooled all their Finnish death and doom influences, letting them mulch and ferment. ¶ A 2017 demo, Altar of Decay, served notice that some fresh hell had evolved out of oldschool death metal’s second coming. Their 2019 debut, Disgorged From Psychotic Depths, went deeper, expanding their sound, but its follow-up, Preserved in Torment, finds the band really hitting their straps with an epic record, on which the rhythm guitar sounds as though it has been composted and exhumed. This, says Bowman, is great news. “I really appreciate you saying that because that is exactly what we are going for,” he says. “We want it to sound murky and disgusting, and low and fucking gross!”

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Disgusting, low and fucking gross sounds achievable, but it is no low-hanging fruit. Bowman and Slaker approach death metal guitar tone like vignerons on the Loire, not content with their 2021 harvest until the noble rot has advanced.

As Bowman tells it, things got out of hand in the studio. “We used a total of 10 amps!” he says. “We used 10 fucking amps, man! We just went off on the guitar tone.”

Somewhere, unconsciously perhaps, Pacific Northwest climate steered the sound, too. “It’s funny—there’s this juxtaposition of dark, gray, cold, shitty weather with these beautiful evergreen trees,” says Bowman. “I really do think that our surroundings and the climate has a lot to do with it. It creates this really ethereal landscape. But then, as a result of that, in a town like Olympia, all the houses have black mold! Especially

during COVID, there’s not a lot to do other than sit and rot in your moldridden house!”

It’s probably a coincidence that Preserved in Torment’s arrival coincides with the 30th anniversary of Metallica’s Black Album. With the Bob Rock-esque guitar layering and that same audiophile sensibility, maybe there’s something in that. After a day’s tracking, they’d watch Metallica DVDs. Will Mortiferum fill stadiums playing death/doom? Who knows? Bowman just wants us to luxuriate in the atmosphere.

“We are not bringing people together so they can just watch us,” he says. “The idea is we want them to feel something. We want them to get fully immersed in the heaviest fucking thing they’ve ever heard. I want us to be so loud you can feel it in your chest when we are playing.”

—JONATHAN HORSLEY

PHOTO BY CARTER MURDOCH

Slowly we rot, so might as well get moist from some moldy Pacific Northwest death/doom

HELHEIM

HELHEIM

Viking metal heroes pillage and plunder with newfound maturity

N

orwegian black metal-inspired matelots Helheim turn 29 this year. Hard to believe the band that rowed out of Bergen with debut Jormundgand (1995) is the same outfit that now occupies rarified air on new album WoduridaR. Translated as “the wild rider,” WoduridaR finds the quartet picking up and improving upon previous works—namely, 2017’s LandawarijaR—where viciousness, sharp wits and perseverance are forged into epic sonic weapons. But they didn’t look to the bounties of present-day Regnbyen for inspiration this time around. Nor did the outfit find their muse in Western Norway’s rich history to inform their 11th long-player. ¶ “[From] ourselves, actually,” vocalist/bassist V’gandr says of the band’s muse. “We’ve been looking at our own musical endeavors and took it from there. We’re a band that never sets any limits for ourselves, so everything is allowed. We just twist and turn like a fucking worm, and in the end, we have a new album.” ¶ Certainly not as pedestrian as a slimy invertebrate, Helheim’s forays into progressive, introspective, bellicose metal on WoduridaR 38 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

have been and continue to be similar to the adventures fellow oarsmen Enslaved, Einherjer and Hades (now Hades Almighty) embarked on. Tracks like “Forrang for fiender,” “Litil vis made” and “Vilje av stål” reinforce the group’s black metal-informed foundation, where cold, steely riffs, fiery vocals and windy blasts form compellingly grim mail-piercers. WoduridaR isn’t just battle cry after battle cry, however. There’s contemplation, commitment and sentimentality at play, especially on “Ni s soli sot” and “Det kommer i bølger.”

“Even though we’re older doesn’t mean we don’t have aggression in us,” V’gandr counters. “Maybe a more mature form of aggression.

More thought through, maybe, but still rage and anger in its purest form. We were very focused on having more extreme vocals this time around, as I think we’ve been lacking that aggression for some

while. With that, I mean how we perform in the studio. We had to really take a good look at ourselves and find the flame within. I feel that it’s imperative for Helheim to still showcase aggression and hate, though in a different manner than on, let’s say, Jormundgand.”

As with other acts of the pandemic era, Helheim are focusing on what they can control. Songwriting, namely. Indeed, as WoduridaR lands via long-standing Norwegian indie Dark Essence, V’gandr and his fellow warriors will begin rehearsals for its follow-up.

“No rest for the wicked,” says V’gandr. “We might do a few shows in Norway, but none abroad before this pandemic is over in a sense where traveling will be safe enough that we don’t have to go into quarantine when returning to Norway.

As of now, that’s just too risky. Fuck quarantine! Been there, done that, and never again.” —CHRIS DICK

DECIBEL : NOVEMBER 2021 : 39

MONO

transform sonic alchemy from science to art

by JUSTIN M. NORTON

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akaakira “Taka” Goto was hit by a bout of insomnia the night Mono

finished their 20th anniversary show in London in 2019. His relentless thoughts went over every detail of the band’s two-decade journey. The story reminded him of Paulo Coehlo’s novel The Alchemist. In the book, a shepherd boy leaves home searching for riches and ultimately finds self-discovery and wisdom instead. ¶ The sleepless night led directly to the title of Mono’s 11th album, Pilgrimage of the Soul, the follow-up to Nowhere Now Here. The album was written in the months before the pandemic, but recorded in Chicago during the summer 2020 COVID-19 surge. Pilgrimage is based on Mono’s unforgettable sense of dynamics and new sounds like electronica, techno and even disco.

enter the U.S.,” he says. “We looked into this Goto attributes some of the changes to the addition of new drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla, thoroughly as well, but no one could give us a clear answer.” a multi-instrumentalist based in New York.

Mono ultimately decided to roll the dice and Cipolla joined during the recording of Nowhere, record in person since they didn’t see anyone but became fully integrated into Mono during a yearlong world tour, including the 20th anni- else providing the Albini touch. “There are not many studios that can produce high-quality versary orchestra shows. “This was the first analog recordings like Electrical Audio,” he said, record I wrote since Dahm joined,” Goto says, adding that many string and wind instrument adding that “the band was completely reborn” players Mono hire also live in Chicago. “In the with the addition. “We felt we were doing the grand scheme of things, we had a strong wish most satisfying live performances. His drumto record. All of the songs were finished before ming was like a gift from the universe. I was the pandemic, and we also had just successfully able to write very freely while imagining his finished our 20th anniversary world tour, so our drumming. I feel that the range the band can motivation was very high.” now express has expanded.”

Cipolla lives in the Mono formed in 1999 United States and could and, in the ensuing years, get to Chicago quickly. blazed an eclectic, yet sucThe rest of the band cessful path. The band practiced in Tokyo and tours relentlessly—or at communicated with their least did before COVID-19— new drummer remotely. playing as many as 150 “Once we got to Chicago, shows a year across conwe all met up, rented tinents. Although loosely one of Steve’s studios, rooted in the esoteric and rehearsed over several underground, Mono have days and recorded,” Goto been wildly successful and says. “We had worries, embraced by music critof course, but in the ics and fans. Mono also end everything went as score films in addition to planned, thankfully.” recording and touring.

While Albini’s bona The idea behind fides are known, Goto Pilgrimage is, in essence, says the “true genius the same foundation as engineer” was a differMono’s earlier work— ence-maker. “Musically continue to evolve. On and logistically, he crethe 11th record, that ates sounds that appeal meant embracing sounds to the heart by fusing the fans haven’t heard, but band’s sounds, electronnever losing the band’s unorthodox streak. There TAKAAKIRA “TAKA” GOTO ics, strings, wind instruments and more, boldly is plenty for listeners to and perfectly, like a magitake in on the record, cian. Our mastering engineer, Bob Weston, is also whether it’s the majestic sweep of the second fantastic. We’re one team. It’s because of people track “Imperfect Things,” the lush soundscapes like them who understand, adore and pour love of “Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand” into Mono’s music that we can make satisfying or the classical backing on “And Eternity in an Hour.” “Of course, I’m confident about the music records like this.”

Goto says the irascible Albini even compliI’ve been writing and satisfied with them,” mented him at the end of the sessions. “When Goto says of his earlier work. “Still, the feeling we finished recording and played all the songs of wanting to write even better music hasn’t on the master tape, Steve said, ‘I can listen to changed ever since I was young.” this album forever.’ That made me happy.”

While ideas flowed freely when the band wrote Pilgrimage, getting everyone together in One thing about being together for decades is Steve Albini’s Chicago studio wasn’t easy due to traditions or rituals. For Goto, that means always the pandemic. Some people recommended that sharing a new album demo with Temporary the band stay out of the United States entirely.

Residence founder and owner Jeremy DeVine. “I Many bands embraced remote recording for new listen to his opinions and ideas and revise,” Goto projects, but Goto says the album couldn’t come says. “This is something I’ve been doing for almost together correctly without Albini’s involvement. 20 years now. He’s our most reliable and impor“Back then, we were not even sure if we could tant partner when it comes to composition.”

When we finished recording and played all the songs on the master tape, Steve [Albini] said,

INSECT ARK

FUTURE FOSSILS A shape-shifting, clustered and minimal ambient dread/ hallucinatory noise offering for Insect Ark’s 9th release, this time in solo/improv form.

‘I can listen to This album foRevEr.’ That made me happy.

OUT ON

SEPT. 24, 2021 via

CONSOULING SOUNDS

store.consouling.be D E C I BDEELC I: BNEOLV:EAMPBREI R L 2 0 2 1 : 41

FOREVER UNDERGROUND Black/doom destroyers

CHURCHBURN outshine their own death metal bona fides

by KEVIN STEWART-PANKO | photo by MIKE ST. ONGE

T

he one comment that’s always out there from hardcore death metal fans

is, ‘Dave, please come back to death metal!’” Churchburn drummer Ray McCaffrey is laughing as he recounts death metal heads’ reactions to a member of death metal royalty—Dave Suzuki—playing in a not-strictly death metal band. “With Dave’s lineage and history, he has a built-in fanbase, but a lot of people still definitely don’t get what he’s doing.” ¶ Those refusing to look beyond Suzuki—who handles guitar and vocals in Churchburn—and his decade-plus tenure in Vital Remains (not to mention live stints with Deicide) are missing out on how this particular band is as brutal and uncompromising as anything in his rearview. And if buddy in the Monstrosity longsleeve still ain’t buying it, the Rhode Island arsonists’ third album, Genocidal Rite, is rife with as much old-school sewer-stomping and Dechristianize-esque leads as emotionally evocative, doom/death/sludge despondency. Not bad for a band that started a decade ago as a one-man project by a gentleman who only knew how to play one instrument.

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“I was at the end of an eight-year run with a band called Sin of Angels, which just wasn’t fun anymore,” says McCaffrey about Churchburn’s history. “After I came up with the name, I literally Photoshopped a burning church with a basic font logo and put it online saying, ‘Coming soon.’

But it was just me; I didn’t know how to play guitar or bass or kazoo or anything, but I was going to make it a one-man band for fun. Dave messaged me asking, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ [Laughs] I told him what I wanted to do: playing slower; riffs you don’t have to think too much about; something really heavy with dark overtones. He was ready to start playing again, so we said, ‘Let’s do it!’”

After a couple of lineups—and drafting guitarist Timmy St. Amour and bassist Derek Moniz for 2018 predecessor None Shall Live… the Hymns of Misery—the quartet got to work on Genocidal Rite, only to be held up by a combination of COVID and the death of Suzuki’s father, which ended up as both creative outlet and silver lining to a tragic situation.

“A lot of the material was written before the pandemic,” McCaffrey explains. “We’d already planned to take 2020 off to do the album, and along came COVID to be like, ‘That’s exactly what you’re doing!’ In late 2019, Dave got the

we were still heavily involved with Ben and Armageddon,” McCaffrey continues. “Fast forward to this album, and Ben was trying to run the shop and release records during COVID, and Dropdead had those reissues coming out at the time. Ben and I go way back, and I figured it would be less of a pain in his ass to not put out our record. He was good with that, and Drew was still interested.”

The opportunity provided by Translation Loss also had Churchburn thinking about a wider scope of potential as well as being able to go a little harder; to take a proverbial step up while remaining firmly rooted in the underground.

“Absolutely!” McCaffrey exclaims. “This isn’t me talking bad about Armageddon, but it’s a grassroots label doing whatever they can. At

We dissected everything, and by the time the other guys got involved again, it was like,

news that his dad had taken ill. So, in January he went out to Vegas, where his parents are.

After his father passed, he came back, and while he was digesting what had happened, COVID was ramping up. Timmy works at a Whole Foods and Derek works as a tattooist and in a mental health facility, so we weren’t really practicing because this was before the vaccine.

Dave and I were talking about things, and we weren’t entirely happy with some of the songs.

So, we’d get together once in a while and took that time to dissect everything. By the time the other guys got involved again, it was like, ‘Surprise, we rewrote the album!’ But we were glad we did, and once they brought their input, it gave the songs that little more and made everything better.”

After capturing Genocidal Rite’s elegiac sonic jigsaw, the next step was capitalizing on the momentum business-wise. With their two previous releases seeing the light of day via Armageddon, the label/shop owned by Dropdead’s Ben Barnett, the band took advantage of an association developed between ex-Howl member St. Amour and Relapse staffer Drew Juergens, who also co-runs Translation Loss Records.

“We’d actually heard from Drew when we were doing Hymns of Misery, but at that point

Surprise, we rewrote the album!

RAY McCAFFREY some point, it made sense to do something different, maybe achieving more, especially with three of us being in our late 40s. Translation Loss made sense because it doesn’t come with the burden of a big label telling us we have to hit the road for months at a time, because that’s not going to happen; but it’s definitely on a different plateau from where we were.”

Now, one hopes hardcore death metal fans will open up and embrace a bit more than Dave Suzuki’s past.

“One of the best comments I’ve ever read was from years ago said, ‘Dave Suzuki is to death metal what Bruce Lee is to the martial arts.’”

McCaffrey recalls. “That still makes me laugh and still makes Dave blush, because he’s so incredibly humble. It’s like, ‘Guys, death metal is going to be OK. Dave’s still doing extreme music; it’s just not a hundred million miles an hour.’”

D E C I BDEELC I: BNEOLV:EAMPBREI R L 2021 : 43

TO

AND BACK H Full of Hell overcome a two-year run of chaos with 12 more sonic blasts of madness

by SHANE MEHLING photo by JESS DANKMEYER NP OR V IELM2B0E2R1 2 44 : A : 0D2E1C :I BDEELC I B E L

ere’s a quick timeline to catch you up: In late

November of 2019, noise-grind craftsmen Full of Hell had their van stolen on tour, losing everything from their gear to their winter coats. They spent the next few months haggling with insurance companies, buying new equipment (with help from heartwarming GoFundMe donations) and trying to get back on track.

They certainly did not have the luxury of sitting around; as artists in residence at Roadburn 2020, they had to conceive and rehearse four separate sets for the European festival, which was to be followed by even more touring. ¶ Then, three weeks before they were set to leave, we’re back to the same story we’ve had rubbed in our faces over and over.

“We plan things really far ahead,” says vocalist Dylan Walker. “We were basically sitting on 2020, thinking we have all these tours planned.

And we just slowly realized how real it was, and everything just fucking fell apart. Everyone thought, ‘What the fuck do we do with our lives?’”

But did the band let the global pandemic get them down?

Of course they did. This shit sucks.

“There’s such a huge vacuum when this is gone, and it’s extremely depressing,” Walker adds. “I’d always thought, ‘What would I do if this shit disappeared?’ It’s all-encompassing. We work to feed ourselves on the side as well, but we really do rely on this income ... to give us purpose. Playing and touring is our greatest joy. I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t think I can do anything else.”

Despite the gut shot, the quartet continued working. A lot. And as soon as regulations allowed, they booked studio time to record their fifth and most dynamic full-length yet, Garden of Burning Apparitions.

“I think this was probably the quickest writing process we’ve ever done,” guitarist Spencer Hazard says, “just for the fact I was so bummed out we had to cancel everything. Before the pandemic, I had one or two riffs, and right after that tour I was just by myself having to do a shitty construction job all day. So, I’d get home and play guitar all the fucking time. We ended up writing this record in like two months.”

And yet, Garden manages to sound like their most fleshed-out release, where in just a little over 20 minutes they stuff in death metal, hardcore, blasting, harsh electronics and the kind of genuine noise rock you’d hear on an AmRep comp. “[Weeping Choir] was definitely way more straightforward death metal,” Hazard says of their 2019 full-length. “But with this new record, I’ve taken more cues from playing with other musicians, like the guys from Eye Flys [a Hazard side project]. Listening to more noise rock, I’ve definitely reeled back some of the structures and time signatures. So, it still has way more hardcore and punk and experimental elements, but plenty of death metal and deathgrind riffing.”

As to whether the whole band embraced these new approaches, it wasn’t much of a tough sell. “I think everyone was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Hazard confirms. “Because we love playing blast beats, but being a band this long, it’s hard to play songs like that all the time. So, we wanted to write some of these, thinking in a live setting we’re not just going a million miles an hour. We need more rock/noisy/slow stuff. It’s still Full of Hell, even if it is a new influence.”

And, it must be mentioned, this is not their only musical outlet.

While 2020 saw the band put out multiple releases—including a collaboration with Health, a noise box set and a live LP—both Walker and Hazard have other projects, such as Sightless Pit, Sore Dream, Industrial Hazard and the aforementioned Eye Flys. It’s hard to ignore their consistent output, even if they don’t find it that impressive.

“I know we release a lot of stuff,” Hazard says, “but we don’t do a ton compared to, like, Man Is the Bastard. We always looked up to bands that were constantly trying to push themselves creatively.”

Walker adds, “I don’t think we’re insanely prolific. I think it’s a scale thing, or a subculture thing. It’s in Spencer’s DNA, and I admire and want to do the same thing. Why wouldn’t we just make stuff all the time?”

And that feeling is strong as ever, as Walker says they’ll do “whatever we have to [do] to be a band, no matter what.” Their plans after Garden of Burning Apparitions are “a million records” and “heavy touring,” no matter how long it takes to get back to normal. At least Full of Hell were able to celebrate a little, playing their first show back in their hometown of Ocean City, MD, a packed house before friends and family.

“Out of being a band for almost 13 years, we’ve only played six local shows ever,” Hazard reveals. “It was exceptionally crazy and exceptionally special. It felt like one of the best sets we’ve ever played.”

Walker agrees: “Our first gig back was supposed to be Psycho Las Vegas, and I didn’t want to play some giant-ass stage when we’ve not been able to acclimate to it in two years. We wanted to crack the dust off. We were only going to disappoint our parents. No big deal.”

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interview by

QA j. bennett

AL JOURGENSEN WI T H

MINISTRY mastermind metastasizes Moral Hygiene

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S

omehow, Al Jourgensen is 62 years old. He started Ministry in they would call ahead of time and say, “We have

1981, followed by a plethora of side projects like Lard, Revolting Cocks, Pailhead, etc., while doing all the heroin, crack and booze he could get his hands on. Ask about the key to his longevity, and he’ll tell you this: “I’m pickled. I saw it with [William S.] Burroughs when I used to hang with him. He looked 73 at 23, and he looked 73 at 73.

So, maybe I have that gene—I don’t know. But I do know that I have a lot of empathy in my soul and heart. I see injustice happening all over the world and somebody’s got to say something about it.” ¶ Which he does in no uncertain terms on Ministry’s new album, Moral Hygiene. Whether it’s the ongoing damage caused by right-wing conspiracy theories (“Disinformation”), the pandemic body count (“Death Toll”) or good old fashioned anti-government screeds (“Broken System,” “We Shall Resist”), Uncle Al is on the case. This time with cameos from Jello Biafra, Arabian Prince of N.W.A. and Billy Idol guitarist Billy Morrison. Best of all? The songs, production and (of course) political outlook recall the early-’90s Psalm 69 era. “I know it sounds corny and hokey-hippie, but I just try and do my best to raise awareness while satisfying my need for getting some real big kickers out there,” our man says. “I just wanna make music that shows the intensity of the situation.”

How have you been holding up during the pandemic?

Well, it’s kind of weird. All I did was the same thing I do every day. I just go to work in my studio in my house and churn out albums. Then I go watch the news and find out another 20,000 died that day or something. I barely go out anyway. I’m not a big party hound at this point in my life. I don’t go to clubs and stuff like that.

For basically a year, my girlfriend and my engineer were about the only people I saw. We just cranked out a bunch of tunes and tried to ride this thing out until things finally started to open up again. If people cooperate, we can get fully back… but we’ll see, you know?

that, I wanted to call the album Truth Decay. We had a whole mock-up for that on the artwork.

Then Obama used that term in his book and it was all over the news. But I was still having all these dental surgeries, so I thought instead of oral hygiene we’ll make it Moral Hygiene. It just seemed like a no-brainer for me at the time because of what was going on. We need some moral hygiene to floss some of the fascist tendencies out of our lives in this country.

You’re no stranger to taking on politics in your music. What’s your take on the state of America during this past year?

Some of it, yeah. Obviously, there’s songs like “Death Toll,” which is just keeping up on the nightly news, like, “Okay—we’re up to 300,000.

Now we’re up to 400,000.” And then all of a sudden the news says it’s over, even though we had a couple of hundred thousand deaths after that. So, some of the songs were obviously topical for the times, but others were just political or societal in nature.

I mean, January 6 was definitely worse than anything I’ve seen in my life. Watching the live footage of that made me puke. I’ve just been watching the [congressional] hearings this morning, and it was even worse than we thought.

But you have to put it in context: These people were always here. They’ve always been here. Our Constitution is partly written by people like that.

Our Civil War is from people like that. Housing discrimination is from people like that, as are racial and gender inequity. So, they’ve always been there, but Trump just got them out from under their rocks.

How did you decide on Moral Hygiene as the album title?

The storming of the Capitol definitely seemed like a new low…

It’s funny because the original name was Truth Decay. Not only was I having a lot of dental work done during the quarantine, but with Trump still in office and his whole Big Lie and all

I’ve never seen anything like it, and you’ve got to remember, I grew up in the ’60s. I watched the left wing blow up buildings and shit like that. But even that’s a little different, because

Is it safe to say this new album is a product of the pandemic?

PHOTO BY ED NE W TON

a bomb in your place because we’re protesting.

You need to get out.” I mean, I went to the 1968 Chicago [Democratic] Convention. I skipped school. I went down with my buddy. I was 10 years old. We got tear-gassed. But I’ve never seen anything like this, where the fascists have just been given a megaphone.

You often generate your best material when America is in bad shape. I’m thinking about the records you put out during the Bush Senior administration, then George W. Bush—and then you wrote this one during the Trump era. Is a bad time for America good for Ministry?

Well, I guess this is the exception because we have good ol’ Sleepy Joe in there. I’m glad they call him Sleepy Joe—it’s the first time I’ve been able to sleep in four years without worrying about waking up to some insane tweet that says we’re going to war with Iran or North Korea or whatever. America needs sleep for the next four years! But yeah, this album was recorded while all that stuff was going on. It’s another Ministry album revolting against a right-wing president.

But I’m happy to have it come out during this period when we’re trying to stabilize things.

What do you make of the “vaccination passport” situation as far as live shows are concerned?

Fingers crossed, bands will be able to play again, and artists will be able to do their thing. I think there will be a cultural explosion after this because people have been locked up for the last year and a half, and artists have suffered the most—and that includes road crews and their families. So, I’m really hoping everything can open up again, but safely. I dug what the Foo Fighters did on their show here in California, where you had to be vaccinated to go. [President Emmanuel] Macron just did this in France, where if you want to go to a restaurant or a café, you have to show proof of vaccination.

It worked. More than a million people in France signed up for the vax after he made that announcement.

I’m 62. In my youth, nobody was squawking about having to get their kids vaccinated for polio or the measles in order to send them to school. And now all of a sudden, it’s, “I don’t trust the government, man.” But guess what? I hate government. I think they’re all corrupt. I don’t even think the government is actually the government. I think they’re just spokespersons for the lizard people, the multibillionaires. So, I get it. You don’t trust them. But guess what?

We’re already microchipped with these cell phones we have. They know exactly what D E C I B E L : N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 1 : 47

 Just one jab. Well, maybe two. OK, probably three

The vaccine is far from the worst thing Jourgensen has put in his body

I just thought was so great. That made more impact on me than if it was a 30-second clip of him reading a speech on MSNBC or something.

So, I recruited my friend Arabian Prince and we decided to honor him with a song because about a third of the country is indoctrinated into future fascism—and John Lewis saw it coming.

You’ve got your old friend Jello Biafra on “Sabotage Is Sex.” Does that mean there’s a new Lard album in the works?

In addition to Moral Hygiene, I wrote another Ministry album, and we did a Lard album. Jello is one of my tightest friends, so when I started making all this music during the pandemic, I said, “I’ve got this stuff that sounds like Lard. Do you want to sing on it?” Then we started working on it through Zoom. So, the new Lard should be pretty interesting. But “Sabotage Is Sex” sounded like a Ministry song.

The question is: Do you like being in quarantine, or did you like life before quarantine?

If you liked life before quarantine, then you should get vaccinated. we’re doing. So, the question is: Do you like being in quarantine, or did you like life before quarantine? If you liked life before quarantine, then you should get vaccinated.

There’s a track called “Disinformation” on the new album. Is there any particular conspiracy theory out there that you think is the most damaging right now? Is it the anti-vax stuff, or something else?

I don’t even think the worst ones have come out yet. I mean, there are Russian bots and the purpose of them is to destabilize democracies.

Russia is a kleptocracy. It’s basically a mafia that runs the entire country, and they pay people to disrupt things so they can make more money.

Hungary and Belarus are the same. The scenario in Brazil is similar, where the government just wants to get the last squeeze of dollars from the petrochemical age.

The tech billionaires have taken over, and they’re the new Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.

48 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

It’s the same stuff going on over and over, because people just don’t learn, and they can’t fight against it. So, we have to be really careful who we pick in our elections. I thought democracy was pretty cool, where people got to choose what goes on in an entire nation, not just a village. But now people are just in it for themselves. There’s no social consciousness anymore, and that’s when societies fall apart.

You’ve railed against many politicians over the years, but your new song “Good Trouble,” with Arabian Prince from N.W.A., is a tribute to Congressman John Lewis. Why did you decide to go in the opposite direction?

I don’t applaud him for being a politician, but I applaud him for being an activist and a good soul. Just the fact that he had the forethought, knowing he was in a terminal stage of cancer, to write something that poignant down [published as a New York Times op-ed] and then make sure it wasn’t released until the day after his death,

You’ve also got Billy Morrison from Billy Idol’s band on a cover of the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.” I’m a big Stooges fan, which automatically makes me wary of Stooges covers.

But I really like how you transformed the song.

Tell me about your approach.

This is kind of a long story, but it’s a good one.

And I sent the song to Iggy first. That’s the reason it’s on the album. If Iggy had said, “This sucks,” I wouldn’t have put it on, because I’ve known Iggy for going on 35 years. So, when Iggy gave me the thumbs up, I decided to put it on the album. But the reason we did the song is that Billy Morrison and Dave Navarro from Jane’s Addiction did this Above Ground benefit to help suicidal teens.

They put a house band together with some really talented musicians, and they decided to do Bowie and Iggy songs. They asked me to do two Iggy songs that they thought I’d be good at.

The day of the show, we did a soundcheck and I did the songs perfectly. Then we went backstage and people were passing around joints.

Now, I’m an avid smoker. I just smoked my vape before I got on the phone with you. But I took a hit of this joint they were passing around, and I don’t know what was in it because when I came out onstage, I felt like I was underwater. You can see it on YouTube. I look like a deer in the headlights. I was just gone. I knew the lyrics, but I was doing it in half time. Fortunately, Billy Morrison figured it out and got the band to play half time with me to a certain extent.

The next day I woke up and sent apology texts to everyone involved. But Billy was like, “No, man—that was awesome! We need to do it that way in the studio.” So, we did it and it sounded powerful. But I’ll never smoke someone else’s weed before a show again.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

by

blake harrison

Ooh Crikey…

It’s a Hall of Fame the making of Lawnmower Deth’s Ooh Crikey… It’s Lawnmower Deth

O

ver 30 years ago, the nascent

anonymous critiques, no one to stop extreme music scene gave birth them and no one to ask, “What is this all to well-regarded and influenabout?” It just was, and it was distinctly tial acts such as Napalm Death, Lawnmower Deth.

Morbid Angel, Entombed, “Big and fat and bouncy rectangle on Carcass, Godflesh and also, uh, the floor,” growls singer Qualcast “Koffee Lawnmower Deth. Five schoolmates in Perkulator” Mutilator (Pete Lee) on Ooh their late teens/early 20s released their Crikey’s “Satan’s Trampoline,” a song magnum opus, Ooh Crikey… It’s Lawnmower about the devil inflicting a new, more Deth! Entrenched in the early tape-trading horrible form of punishment: bouncphenomenon and the U.K.’s burgeoning ing forever in Hell. Pulling from punk, thrash explosion, Lawnmower Deth were thrash, death metal, doom and even a one-of-a-kind experience. Ooh Crikey’s ska, these goofballs did the improbable: DBHOF203 playful singularity may have had its roots injecting some humor into a genre awash in more “fun” acts such as Adrenalin O.D., in its own seriousness. Twenty-five tracks but their uniqueness stemmed from their covering topics as diverse as groinal camaraderie. Recorded in under a week gardens, legless crawling, drugs and getat Slaughterhouse Studios with tons of ting drunk at the Betty Ford Clinic, Ooh Ooh Crikey… It’s Lawnmower Deth lager—and based off of the success of a Crikey is an absurd romp through extreme E A R ACHE split LP with the equally silly Metal Duck— metal. With over half of the tracks clockSE PT E M BE R 1 9 9 0 Lawnmower Deth crafted a bombastic fulling in at under a minute, there’s not a lot length debut on the rising metal label (and of room for interpretation.

If you don’t like it, duck off fellow Nottingham staple) Earache.

Much like S.O.D.’s classic Speak Tracks such as “Rad Dude,” “F.A.T.” English or Die, Ooh Crikey assaults the and “Sheep Dip” (an ode to veganism) listener with sharp, short stabs of may have been mostly satire, but also humor, wit and cynicism. To quote Pete had one foot in punk ethics, engaging Lee, “Originality really sucks / don’t with contemporary politics. Best known for a cover of “Kids in America” mean nothing in their books / clichéd bands to a written formula.” by pop sensation Kim Wilde, Lawnmower Deth had fun, and they didn’t Lawnmower Deth were original enough; no one has ever come close to care whether it was funny or not. The fact that they were having fun sounding like them. So, grab a Newcastle Brown Ale, have yourself a was enough. And Ooh Crikey is fun indeed. There was no internet to lob laugh and “Assume the Position.”

LAWNMOWER DETH

DECIBEL : 51 : NOVEMBER 2021

DBHOF203

LAWNMOWER DETH ooh crikey… it’s lawnmower deth

With Morbid Angel, Napalm Death and Carcass, Earache was taking off in the early ’90s. How were you approached to record Ooh Crikey, and how did it feel to have a label like Earache interested?

STEVE “CONCORDE FACERIPPER” NESFIELD: Earache weren’t initially interested in signing us. I vividly remember seeing [Earache founder] Digby [Pearson] walk past me when I was up some scaffolding working on a building in Nottingham.

I started shouting at him, telling him to sign us, and he actually ran away! To be fair, this was before we had actually released anything other than the two demos, and we didn’t have any experience apart from a couple of pub gigs where we made songs up on the spot. We were, to be quite honest, fucking terrible… but when does that stop you from trying? After we released the split album and started to build a small, dedicated following, and magazines like Kerrang! started to feature interviews with us, Dig had a change of heart and took a gamble on us. We were pretty stoked, as you can imagine. Being a local record company meant we could raid their CD stock on a regular basis, too!

PETE “QUALCAST MUTILATOR” LEE: We signed within six weeks of inception to RKT Records to do the [1989] split album with Metal Duck. Who said the music industry was difficult? I was working for HMV and I knew Dig at Earache, as he used to come to the store and make me put Terrorizer albums on display where people might find and buy them. We used to chat, and he knew all about Lawnmower and our “reputation.” The way it actually happened in the end was we were doing a show in Hull with Re-Animator, and Dig came along with us to see the show; he also brought the producer Colin Richardson with him. We signed there and then. Not quite the Who at the Marquee, but what does that matter?

GAVIN “SCHIZO ROTARY SPRINTMASTER” O’MALLEY:

We just hounded Dig, and he eventually gave in.

We still hound him now, and I still see him at lots of gigs in and around Nottingham. We are into exactly the same music and our paths cross a lot now, as they did back then. Whether it’s a Rival Sons or Napalm Death show, Dig, like us, is a music fan, and he will be there with a massive grin on his face. For me, personally, I was really into all the Earache bands back then, so to be on the same label as Carcass, Morbid Angel [and] Napalm Death was just a dream come true. I use that phrase a lot in Lawnmower Deth—the whole journey and experience truly is a dream come true.

CHRIS “EXPLODIN’ DR. JAGGERS FLYMO” FLINT: I can’t remember how we were approached by Earache, but I was totally in awe of being asked to join such an exciting and influential label. I

“Those fucking pseudonyms!

Really funny when you are 19 being called Qualcast Mutilator; much less so when you’re 51.”

PET E “Q UA LCAST MUT ILATO R” LE E loved all the Earache bands—they were totally groundbreaking at the time, and it meant we could get free CDs and vinyl of all these amazing bands. It was a total win-win situation!

CHRIS “MIGHTYMO DESTRUCTIMO” PARKES: It wasn’t so much that Dig approached us; it was the reverse. We told Dig that he had to sign us, and eventually he did. Dig would come and see us; he is from Nottingham, we are from Nottingham.

We liked the same music, went to the same gigs, hung out at the same places. It was always going to happen—we just knew it before he did.

What do you remember about the underground metal scene around the time of Ooh Crikey’s release?

I personally didn’t really consider anything as being “underground” at that time.

There were loads of venues in and around Nottingham where you could go and see bands for a couple of quid, get pissed for £5 and generally have a great night out with your mates. We were lucky to have seen bands like Sabbat at one of their first gigs and followed them around like a bad smell. Other U.K. bands also started to gain some momentum—Acid Reign, Xentrix, Re-Animator, Virus—so I suppose they were the U.K. “underground” scene that I remember most from around that era.

NESFIELD:

NOVEMBER 2021 : 5 2 : DECIBEL

The pseudonyms on the record are very unique.

What influenced you to take the names in this direction? Are there any stories about them?

LEE: Those fucking pseudonyms! Really funny when you are 19 being called Qualcast Mutilator; much less so when you’re 51. Why won’t people simply call me “Sir”? It was a reaction to bands at the time. A lot of posturing, too much leather and studs, and too many ridiculous names. But if it was good enough for Bathory, it was good enough for us, so Mr. Flymo started it, then we all had to come up to speed quickly.

FLINT: When I did the [It’s a] Lot Less Bover [Than a Hover] demo, I decided I needed a “metal” name to rival Cronos and Quorthon, so I decided to be “Mr. Flymo” as the instrumentalist on the demo, and also “‘Mr. Qualcast,” the producer of the demo.

NESFIELD: Lots of alcohol and long nights supping “green deaths” down the Little John [pub]. Everything we did was done solely to make us laugh.

O’MALLEY: I was the last to join so, “Rotary Sprintmaster” was the only mower name left no one had used.

PARKES: We took the lead from Mr. Flymo, who was and is an absolute legend. He is our mentor.

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LAWNMOWER DETH ooh crikey… it’s lawnmower deth

and hard drugs session and gave us our names as he rose from the pits of hell, spewing forth fire, venom and hate for mower enslavers.

A lot of thrash bands at the time had less than serious albums (Carnivore’s Retaliation, S.O.D.’s Speak English or Die). What made you decide to inject more humor into your band?

O’MALLEY:

If it made us laugh, then we went

that didn’t exist. He recorded It’s a Lot Less Bover With a Hover as a joke, which, to be honest, completely backfired on him when Kerrang! put his advert and made-up gig list in one of their early editions. We actually saw the gig list and wanted to go and see them!

LEE: A heady mix of an inability to spell, laziness and dumbass rock ‘n’ roll says, “Spell your name badly—it’s what cool kids do.”

O’MALLEY: Mr. Flymo thought, “What is the most ridiculous ‘death’ I can think of?” At the time, loads of bands were death this or death that.

with it.

Lack of talent, sharing the same sense of humor and generally not knowing any better!

LEE: Yeah, us and many others. Spazztic Blurr, S.O.D., eventually Mr. Bungle and so on—it’s always been there. It was mainly the combined humor of everyone in the band, and we were probably more influenced by the likes of The Young Ones and Comic Strip than bands, so that came through. At the time, we were listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. No one said every song had to be about Satan, fast cars and girls. We simply pleased ourselves and wrote about what made us laugh. And 30 years later, how we laugh when we have to sing, “Watch out Grandma, here comes a lawnmower, going to rip your face oooooooo-offff.” Who the fuck expected us to be doing this 30 years later?

PARKES: It was the way that we were and still are—we just like fucking about and making each other laugh. At the end of the day, we are mates.

We would still be mates if we weren’t in the band, and mates fuck around, take the piss out of each other, get drunk and talk shit.

FLINT: Our collective personalities were humorous and we just enjoyed having a laugh. There were plenty of bands already singing about the usual death and destruction and Satan-type stuff, so we just sang about stupid stuff that amused us.

NESFIELD:

What happened to the “a” in “Deth”? Where did the band’s name originate?

FLINT: When I did the first demo, the original artwork had the word “death” in it. Then someone did some much better artwork for me, and I think they were a big fan of Megadeth and they missed out on the “a.” I didn’t expect anything to come of the band, as it was me arseing around in my bedroom. I didn’t care how the name was spelt, so I left it spelt incorrectly.

PARKES: Back in the day, to be cool, you had to have Death somewhere in your band name. We decided to be different and drop the “a,” which obviously inspired Megadeth, as they copied us very quickly.

NESFIELD: It was a bit of a piss take. It was Mr. Flymo who came up with the band name. He started the band as a joke and it was just him, lots of lager and a general feeling of frustration.

That prompted him to create a demo by a band

What’s the story behind the name Ooh Crikey?

FLINT: Ooh Crikey was a crap sitcom scene on The Young Ones comedy program that amused us for some reason, and it fitted in with our stupid attitude that we had at the time.

LEE: I honestly don’t know. Well, every day is a school day; I had no idea why that was called that. Did I miss the memo? I just thought it sounded good.

You recorded Ooh Crikey at Slaughterhouse Studios in Driffield, which purportedly became the Earache house studio because Napalm Death’s Mick Harris loved the sound on an album by the Sundays recorded there. What do you remember about the recording session? How long did you spend in the studio?

LEE: We had signed to Earache and they wanted us to go there. You’re right about Mickey Harris.

It was the first real studio we had used. Steve Harris—not the Maiden fella—who went on to produce Kaiser Chiefs, U2 and Kodaline, was the in-house engineer. We liked him and he had already been working on Acid Reign and Little Angels, so we had mutual friends. Initially, we were going to use Colin Richardson, but it didn’t work out—shame, cos he’s a really nice bloke.

But Stilly Harris was perfect for us. We did it all fairly quickly—about five or six days, I think.

I just remember a lot of drinking, long days, long nights. Anyone sleeping in what was the vocal booth got a very good, dark, silent, undisturbed night’s sleep. Paddy [O’Malley] came after work throughout the session, but the rest of us thought this was the true glamour of what rock ‘n’ roll looked like. It was an amazing time. It later burned down in suspicious circumstances.

NESFIELD: It was actually bolted onto the back of a pub; it also had a nightclub downstairs. We actually drank Driffield dry of Newcastle Brown while we were there. I’ve no idea how we got anything done; it just seemed to be one long drinking session.

PARKES: I remember laughing, drinking ale.

I don’t really remember much about playing because we got that done pretty quickly. It was a really good laugh; we had a great time.

O’MALLEY: I was the only one who could not get time off work for the recording. I would work during the day, then drive to the studio to record NOVEMBER 2021 : 5 4 : DECIBEL

at night. Then drive back to work again. Fair to say because of this my recording was shit. I think this was the start of things going wrong for me, so not as pleasant an experience as it should have been. I should have jacked in my job, looking back. Easier said than done to just walk away from a job. I actually fell asleep at the wheel one morning and woke up just in time before ending up in a ditch. Don’t think the guys know about this.

FLINT: I remember taking a while to get a decent drum sound with my crap drum kit and then spending a couple of days with Steve and Chris doing the backing tracks; beyond that it was a haze of drunken laughter at Paddy and Pete doing their parts. I remember sobering up at some point to pick up Craig Cob for him to bring in his synth to lay down “Stress.”

How much of Ooh Crikey was written before the studio and how much was improv? (Looking at “Duck Off” and “Ooh Crikey” here.)

O’MALLEY: All of it was pre-written. I cannot imagine going into a studio and writing under pressure. I don’t think that way would ever work for Lawnmower Deth.

NESFIELD: It was the first time that anyone pointed out that we couldn’t keep time to save our lives! Steve Harris tried—and failed—to get Flymo to play to a click track; the look on his face when the beeps started to come through his headphones was priceless. None of that album is played in time; we basically did it live and overdubbed any really dodgy bits after.

LEE: Everything was written in advance; we’re a little bit shit, and improv isn’t really in the skill set. I quite like clicking around on a keyboard in the studio, though, to see if any interesting noises come out, but I’d suggest it’s more luck than skill.

My first exposure to Lawnmower Deth was “Satan’s Trampoline” on the Grindcrusher comp.

Was the album version already recorded? Did you have any input on which track would be selected for the comp?

LEE: “Satan’s Trampoline” was recorded at the Crikey session. Dig at Earache made all the decisions. The Grindcrusher album, tour and bill were all his ideas. It did get us out to a lot of people who didn’t know about us. People were probably thinking how out of time we sounded next to Godflesh and a drum machine!

You covered “Kids in America” by Kim Wilde, even performing with her a number of times.

What about that song spoke to you?

It was during the Ooh Crikey sessions.

MTV was on and “Kids in America” was on pretty much every half hour. It’s such a great song and we decided we should cover it. We didn’t have time to do it on Ooh Crikey, so we did it as a single instead. We would never have imagined what NESFIELD:

The young ones are going  Fliers for early Lawnmower Deth shows, including appearances from Sacrilege, Sabbat and Saxon as well as art from a young Dan Seagrave

it would eventually lead to, though: meeting, recording and playing live with Kim! What an honor that was!

LEE: It was a massive song at the time. It wasn’t a polar leap to think we could make a very noisy version of it, and later a more tuneful version of it. It still is a really great song. Having gotten to play it live with Kimmy is one of my favorite things ever; she’s top fun. So, it all came together beautifully. You should see them play it live; it is way rockier than it ever was on record.

I’d like to think we might have been a bad influence in there somehow.

PARKES: We all fancied Kim big time and knew that we would meet and play with her one day if we covered it.

Schizo Rotary Sprintmaster (Gavin “Paddy” O’Malley) left the band shortly after the recording. What precipitated this?

Because we hate him.

It was all a bit daft looking back on it now, but Paddy is a twat. He still is, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that because he is a massive bell end. I’ve no idea how he even gets dressed in the morning, let alone get through a day intact! At that time, however, we were under pressure to start writing new material and it just wasn’t happening; things kind of came to a head

PARKES:

NESFIELD:

and we sacked him. It wasn’t a pleasant time and none of us felt good about doing it, but we would have split up if it hadn’t happened. Paddy has managed to sneak back in the band!

FLINT: From what I remember, I think we had issues with his guitar style being a bit sloppy at the time. But then I can’t talk; my drumming style has always been pretty shit! Paddy is a really good friend of mine, and it was a very hard decision to make, but we were young and stupid.

LEE: His bad jokes, I think. Honestly, I can’t remember; it was so long ago. I don’t think we were getting on overly well at the time. He’s a lovely bloke, even if he does have an unnecessary fixation with parrots, but he can be a bit of a bell end. It probably got heated. I know it was on a night when we supported Saxon, and we chucked him out when we came offstage.

Naturally, he wasn’t very happy. I suspect on our side we were young, arrogant and total bell ends, too.

O’MALLEY: I think it started to go wrong during recording, as I mentioned earlier. I am not a great studio guitarist at the best of times, and I think I am more of a live player. Looking back, I was and still am a bell end. A nice guy, but a bell end. I was getting more and more into death metal at the time, and I think this hindered DECIBEL : 55 : NOVEMBER 2021

my writing. It’s all water under the bridge, and we have put it behind us and moved on. I am so chuffed to be back in the Lawnmower family now; some of the happiest moments in my life have been with these guys.

Obviously, there is a tremendous streak of humor that runs through the record, as seen in song titles such as “Spook Perv Happenings in the Snooker Hall” and “Sumo Rabbit and His Inescapable Trap of Doom.”

LEE: What’s not funny about a rabbit who thinks he’s a sumo wrestler and wants to beat up people who hate his kind of music? To be honest, it’s probably funny to us and not funny to others if you explain it. That had-to-be-there-at-the-time thing. Let’s just say it’s all pretty left of center, and people can get what they want from it if they think it’s art. Throw it away if they think it’s rubbish, or simply take it for what it is, which is noise and words.

FLINT: The only lyrics I had anything to do with were “Judgement Day (Assume the Position),” which was about my—and Craig Cob’s—boss at work threatening to spank me with a cricket bat if I misbehaved. It was all part of the banter when I worked at the pit, but I wrote it on work time and therefore got paid by British Coal to write it.

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LAWNMOWER DETH ooh crikey… it’s lawnmower deth

A lot of it comes from being mates throughout our school years and into early adulthood. We all shared the same sense of humor and watched the same comedies on telly: Young Ones, National Lampoon’s, Monty Python, Bottom. It would only take something as simple as someone saying, “Doesn’t [snooker player] Ray Reardon look like a vampire?” and that would be a new song in the bag. Quite a few songs were about people [that] myself and Chris Parkes worked with back in the day. “Cob Woman of Deth Meets Mr. Smelly Mop” was about the sandwich lady and the cleaner at the place we worked. We just imagined them having a fight! Same with “Satan’s Trampoline.” That was about a bloke who used to teach trampolining to kids, and he used to talk about it all the bloody time… I think we nicknamed him Satan due to his fixed stare when he spoke to you!

NESFIELD:

How did you arrive at the decision to use Dan Seagrave for the cover? The artwork seems very different from his typical style.

LEE: I knew Dan, as he was a mate of my girlfriend at the time. He lived in the same village as Steve, Chris and I. He used to doodle fliers for us in the good old days of paper and handing out gig fliers. When it came to doing the first split album, we asked him to do it, and he did it literally for the price of a packet of crisps and a pint. Getting him to do Ooh Crikey was an obvious thing, and it’s a great sleeve, with so many “in jokes” spread across it. I love it. Obviously, after that, Earache started to use him a lot for Morbid Angel, Entombed and so on; then, suddenly, there wasn’t a death metal release without him having done the cover art. He probably got totally overexposed in two years and then people move on to something else.

NESFIELD: We lived in the same village as Dan, and therefore drank in the same pub. He used to scribble fliers for us on bits of paper when we were down the pub, and they were amazing. When it came to releasing an album, we went straight to him and asked him to do it.

The results were just brilliant. Ooh Crikey was the second one, and for me it’s one of the best album sleeves ever done! We wanted it to be based around the “Flying Killer Cobs [From the Planet Bob]” track, but left it up to him how he actually did it. Boy, did he do it well, though! Digby loved his artwork, too, and started to give him work for other Earache bands off the back of it, and the rest is history, really. The only reason we didn’t use him for [1994 follow-up] Billy is that, as he became a more established artist, he didn’t have as much time to spare. And his prices went up a lot, too—rightly so. I think he did Ooh Crikey for a pint of beer and some crisps! By the time the next record came out, we couldn’t actually afford him!

PARKES: We gave Dan an idea of what we wanted and he did the rest. Dan is a mate from school; we were the first to use him, so MLF [Mower Liberation Front] and Ooh Crikey are the originals of his work.

We were his typical style; everything else is different. Earache had nothing to do with it.

FLINT: That was the first album artwork he did, along with the Quack ’Em All cover for Metal Duck.

So, he owes his entire career to Lawnmower Deth. You’re welcome, Dan.

“Back in the day, to be cool, you had to have Death somewhere in your band name.

We decided to be different and drop the ‘a,’ which obviously inspired Megadeth, as they copied us very quickly.”

CHRIS “MIG HTYMO DE ST RUCT IMO ” PA RKE S

In Choosing Death, Jim Welch said, “When I was running Earache in the U.S., we pretty much knew that when we put out a record in America, it would sell 20,000 copies, or like 6,000 copies of an EP, no matter what it was... barring a Lawnmower Deth record.” What are your thoughts about that?

PARKES: I have no thoughts. I don’t even know who he is.

FLINT: He was totally correct. I don’t think America would get our English humor, and because we weren’t typical serious thrash, they just didn’t seem to understand us. This was a shame, as I would have loved to do an American tour, but it wasn’t going to happen.

NESFIELD: I think we are quite an acquired taste.

It’s interesting that outside of the U.K. we never really got any offers for tours, gigs, etc. Either people didn’t get what we were doing or they NOVEMBER 2021 : 5 6 : DECIBEL

just thought we were shit. Either way. it’s not something we ever really lost any sleep about; we were still having a lot of fun.

LEE: Funny as fuck. I know Jim. At the time, he worked for Columbia, and they licensed some of the Earache catalogue. They only worked with six bands. Really, Jim just worshipped at the altar of Cathedral and Carcass—we were never going to compete with that. We were probably just way too oddball for him or a major label.

He’s probably got a point, to be fair. I could have said, “That’s it, let’s have him,” but he was a nice guy and was about three stone wet, so he’d probably have taken us.

O’MALLEY: I think that is hilarious. Obviously, we sold more than that, right?

How was Ooh Crikey received at the time?

LEE: Surprisingly well. It was Earache’s [at the time] longest-serving U.K. chart album. I think it was top 20 in the indie and metal charts for nine months. Fuck you, Bryan Adams—that’s how to do it! The end result is he owns an island and I own a Nissan. Most of the press actually liked it.

It was that “not getting pigeonholed” thing that was great. However, Metal Forces hated us, and we hated them, so they wrote shit about us, and we wrote shit songs about them. All good playground politics. It was like a really shit version of the Gallagher brothers vs. Robbie Williams.

PARKES: Very well. It got good reviews and loads of people loved it, and still do. It’s a classic; we still love playing the old songs.

O’MALLEY: Better than we ever imagined. Kerrang! loved us! To see us at the top of the indie metal charts was just awesome.

FLINT: It got good reviews in most of the metal press at the time. Metal Forces didn’t like us, which was a shame as I was a big fan of them, and I respected their opinion. Maybe they were right and all the others were wrong!

NESFIELD: For a bunch of amateurs like ourselves, it seemed to be received very well in most of the metal press. Most of the press gave us credit for doing something a bit different.

We get no end of people telling us it was their soundtrack through school and college. Even more surprising is that it became a bit of a cult album in the years where we all went our separate ways band-wise, and as the Internet started to grow, we saw more and more people reviewing it with affection. That’s pretty cool!

Ooh Crikey has a very diverse sound—grindcore, death metal, punk, thrash and ska all make an appearance. What was it about your songwriting process that compelled you not to stick to one style?

Honestly, lack of talent and a huge mixture of different influences within the band.

We didn’t make any conscious effort to try and sound like any other bands; we just wrote what we could play!

NESFIELD:

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LAWNMOWER DETH ooh crikey… it’s lawnmower deth

“We didn’t make any conscious effort to try and sound like any other bands; we just wrote what we could play!”

ST EV E “C O N C O RD E FACE RIPPE R” NE SF IE LD O’MALLEY: I think all our influences just come out naturally. We don’t try to write a certain way.

FLINT: We listened to a lot of different styles of music, and this influenced the way we wrote the album. We all had differing musical tastes, and so it was a mash-up of all our influences.

LEE: No process; all the band listen to a lot of different music, and when it car-crashes in the middle, it sounds like Lawnmower Deth. I suspect Devin Townsend has a very similar approach; it’s just played much better and in time.

What’s your favorite song on the album and why?

FLINT: “Satan’s Trampoline” is my favorite song.

Trampolining is good for your health, but Satan is bad for you. I think it has the best riffs and was always great to play live.

O’MALLEY: For me it’s “Sheep Dip.” Fun to play and just a little bonkers, as it’s just a mishmash of riffs; but it works.

Probably “Flying Killer Cobs” for me.

I loved the vocoder, which we stole from Acid Reign!

PARKES: “Ooh Crikey” because it’s preposterous.

LEE: Probably “Sheep Dip” for no other reason than it’s a banger to play live. It’s just a random collection of riffs with no structure or chorus/verse approach, but oddly it really seems to work.

NESFIELD:

Any last words or thoughts? Either about this time in the band’s career or about the record?

LEE: How/why/anyone knows how this happened? Lucky bastards/right time, wrong place/ right time, right place. Thanks for the support— much appreciated.

NESFIELD: Ooh Crikey is like a stamp in time for me. Every time I listen to it, I get taken back to the time we had in the studio and the fun we were having around that time. I’m amazed that we are still being given the opportunity to play NOVEMBER 2021 : 58 : DECIBEL

this stuff now that we are in our 50s. You can’t buy memories like we have been given by being in Lawnmower Deth. We will never be rock stars, but we have experienced what it’s like to play to thousands of people, and it is amazing.

We have some very loyal fans, some of which travel long distances to come and see us, which we will always be very grateful for. We never thought we would get out of the bedroom band phase let alone record, release and tour doing the rubbish we do.

FLINT: I think Ooh Crikey is the best album we did. I don’t usually listen to the old stuff nowadays, but Ooh Crikey still amuses me when I do hear it.

O’MALLEY: The loyalty our fans have shown us over the years still takes my breath away.

Without you, we are just five idiots making a row. We want to thank you all for being part of this journey, and can’t wait to see where we go next with it.

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BAY AREA THRASH LEGENDS

EXODUS

ISSUE A STUNNING, CAREER-DEFINING ALBUM WHILE FACING DOWN THEIR MORTALITY story by

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ADEM TEPEDELEN |

photos by

HRISTO SHINDOV

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EXODUS Holt was as actively involved with Exodus as his Slayer commitments allowed. He, of course, wrote and played on Blood In, Blood Out, but by his own admission, he wasn’t as hands-on as he had been in the past with all aspects of the recording.

“I was there for everything but the vocals,” he explains. “When we [fired Rob Dukes and brought back] Zetro, everything was sent to me via email, because I was in Europe with Slayer.

So I’d have to get on the phone or email back and forth suggestions, which was a very trying way of doing it, rather than being able to be sitting there directly communicating what you’re looking for in a passage of the song.”

We went and [wrote] in a way we haven’t done in years,

and that’s where the pandemic was a gift to us. uitarist Gary Holt still gets a chuckle recounting a story

he’s probably told hundreds of times about the fateful day he and Exodus drummer Tom Hunting formed their friendship more than four decades ago. Not surprisingly, it involves juvenile delinquency and explosives. “The first time Tom and I hung out, we were kids and he got arrested as we were stealing beef jerky and caps in an Alpha Beta grocery store,” he tells Decibel from his rural home in Meadow Vista, CA. ¶ Music fans can point to this moment, this early union, as a landmark in not just the metal world, but the rock world at large. Hunting would, of course, form the initial incarnation of Exodus in the late ’70s with another guitar-playing friend, Kirk Hammett, and Holt was asked to join them a couple years later. Hammett would famously move on to Metallica in 1983, thus establishing the roots of what would become a thrash metal “family tree” that would branch out in unexpected fashion—directly connecting Exodus to some of the biggest bands in the world.

For Holt, whose journey since the last Exodus album, 2014’s Blood In, Blood Out, has seen him playing massive stadiums and sold-out arenas as the late Jeff Hanneman’s replacement in Slayer, the Hunting anecdote offers not only an example of how deep the musical roots go, but the personal ones as well.

Exodus may have been Ground Zero for thrash metal, but more importantly for Holt and his bandmates—Hunting, vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza, guitarist Lee Altus and bassist Jack Gibson—it’s home. His return to the fold

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full-time in early 2020 has had a profound effect on all parties, especially his relationship with his longtime writing partner and erstwhile partner in crime. “Tom [and Exodus] had been my family since childhood, and I wanted to go back,” he says. “I wanted to go back for a while. I wanted some time to do that.”

most likely

I WAS OCCUPIED

To be clear, Holt was never “out” of Exodus. In

the nearly nine years he played with Slayer— from 2011 to the band’s final shows in late 2019—

We had no tours breaking up writing sessions.

It was Tom and I in a garage with a half stack and a drum kit.

Gary Holt Holt’s time in Slayer—including not only touring, but also recording the band’s 2015 swansong, Repentless—is largely why there was a seven-year gap between BIBO and the band’s latest, Persona Non Grata. (Surprisingly, the pandemic was more help than hindrance, but more on that later.) Though Exodus continued to tour during that time—sometimes with Holt, but more often with his fill-in, Heathen’s Kragen Lum—creating new music wouldn’t happen without Holt.

“Because Gary’s obviously the main songwriter and always has been, when he was busy with Slayer, it was hard to get him to be Exoduscreative,” Souza explains. “Between 2014 and 2017, it just seemed like we couldn’t do [a follow-up to Blood In, Blood Out], and then Slayer announced they were going to do their final tour and we all knew that was going to take two years.”

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EXODUS In another band, losing your main songwriter for an extended period to a “rival” (though ostensibly a friendly one) could have been, at the very least, a career-ender, if not a source of great friction. Surprisingly, not so with Exodus. “We’re each other’s cheering section,” says Souza. “We want each other to succeed. I was so happy for [Gary], especially in the last two years, to get to play some of the biggest stadiums in the world and play sold-out arenas.”

“My [Exodus] bandmates were super supportive,” Holt acknowledges. “Kragen Lum, who is one half of our management team, was my ‘stunt double,’ because I wasn’t going to tell [Exodus] not to go out on tour because I’m not there. I wanted the band to keep working, and the fans were super supportive of that.”

“You have to understand that [Gary] knew that his commitment was to [Slayer] for that time, so the last thing he was going to do was tell [us we] can’t go out and make a living,” Souza confirms. “Who would do that? We’re not geared like that. This band isn’t five individuals; it’s definitely a band.

Both Holt and his Exodus bandmates obviously realized the potential benefits that the Slayer gig might offer. “It was awesome, and it raised my profile tremendously,” Holt enthuses. “It was something that was supposed to be a couple of tours, and it snowballed and brought a lot of good to my life.”

“We knew the magnitude of what Slayer would do for Gary,” says Souza, “and it has done that, believe me. He is the hidden gem in thrash metal that I don’t think ever got his [deserved] notoriety. There’s nobody else that [Slayer] could have picked that would have done that justice like Gary did it, because of his dedication to this music and his being one of the inventors—if not the inventor—of this type of music.”

Nonetheless, the end of his time in the band, following Slayer’s final shows in November 2019, was bittersweet for Holt. “They always treated me like family since day one—and that extended to Jeff and Kathryn Hanneman—that I belonged there and was wanted there,” he says. “It felt like the end of an awesome era; I was honored to be a part of it. It was also somewhat of a relief. Exodus is my first family. Slayer is my second family.”

I MOVE IN with BLAZING SPEED

Holt’s return to his “first family”—the Bay Strikes Back 2020 European tour with Death Angel and Testament—was also bittersweet.

The tour, which began February 6 in Denmark and ended abruptly March 11 in Germany as the global pandemic unfolded, was a huge success, with nearly every date a sellout. “It was fucking awesome; I had the most fun ever,” Holt gushes. “I got strip-searched by Swiss cops. I was on a ferry that I thought was going to go to the bottom of the sea—it was fucking the best

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time I’ve ever had! The shows were crushing and packed. I have this banner hanging in my office that someone made for me over there that says, ‘Welcome Back to the Mothership, Gary,’ and it felt like I was coming back to the mothership.”

“It was a great tour; it was amazing,” Hunting agrees. “And, honestly, if COVID hadn’t hit, we might still be doing that tour. Who knows? It was a pretty smashing success in Europe, and we were already organizing second and third legs of it and maybe going to South America. And then, bam, COVID hit and a bunch of folks on our tour got super sick: Gary; Chuck Billy and his wife; Will Carroll of Death Angel got it really bad. Crazy enough, Will and me were arm-in-arm every night on that tour, doing shots and screaming and sharing joints and probably smoking cigarettes, too. It had to have come into all of our orbits, I think, so maybe I just had a mild case of it. I was sick when we got to Europe in February.

I was sick for eight days and then it went away.

And then other people started getting sick. We didn’t know what it was then.”

By the end of the tour, however, there was no mystery. The band hustled to get back to the U.S. while they still could. With the world suddenly locked down and touring not an option for the foreseeable future, Exodus finally had the opportunity to create new music. In spite of the uncertainty of what the unfolding global pandemic was going to mean for day-to-day life three months, six months or a year in the future, Holt and Hunting wanted to ride the high they’d just come off on the Bay Strikes Back tour and get down to doing what they do so well together: putting sick riffs to vicious beats.

The pair decamped to Hunting’s Lake Almanor compound, located 80 miles northeast of Chico in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and isolated themselves from the growing pandemic madness.

“When [Gary and I] got together to jam in May or June 2020, we were fucking fired up, dude, and the writing went fast,” Hunting says. “It was fast and furious, because we were having fun, we had no worries because we were in the mountains in a COVID-free environment, and nobody was stressed out about anything. We hit it hard. It was awesome; it was fun.”

“We went and did it in a way we haven’t done in years, and that’s where the pandemic was a gift to us,” Holt says. “We had no tours breaking up writing sessions. It was Tom and I in a garage with a half stack and a drum kit. At night we’d sit around with an acoustic and work out stuff, and it was amazing. It was the best way we could have ever worked. We were two guys, as if we were 17 years old, jamming in a garage, back when it didn’t matter if you had a show—you rehearsed five days a week. It was just us jamming and trying everything out.”

“The writing process is pretty much always the same—it all starts with a riff,” Hunting

says. “Sometimes it starts with a drum beat and then a riff goes around it. But it’s pretty much those two elements: rhythm guitar and drums bashing shit out old-school in a room. It’s not complicated. We know our formula pretty good, but I think on this record we took a few chances and went outside the box a little bit and did some stuff that Exodus doesn’t normally do.”

Though a little writing had been done while Holt was still in Slayer, most of Persona originated in these writing sessions in Lake Almanor, which stretched on for months. “Gary was very inspired,” says Hunting of his time writing with Holt. “He was on a fucking tear. You couldn’t stop him. One morning he woke up and was like, I’ve got a song. Just straight out of bed, he laid down the meat and potatoes for a whole song, ‘The Fires of Division.’ So, I took it and wrote a drum part. It didn’t take any time at all. That’s inspiration. I don’t know where it came from, but it was pretty awesome—awesome to see and awesome to be a part of.”

“I was struggling to finish ‘The Fires of Division,’ and just like a lighting bolt, it just hit me one morning,” Holt confirms. “I woke up and was like, I’ve got it, I’ve got it. I tracked it without the drums, just to a click track, and the end of the song wasn’t even written. I just improvised the whole ending harmony bit. It was like, just keep going; I don’t know where I’m going, but let’s find out. [Laughs] And it was totally rad.”

HERE to SET THE BALANCE

As Hunting and Holt began to amass enough

fresh material for the band’s 11th full-length, they inevitably realized their options for how and where to record Persona Non Grata were limited by the pandemic. “We didn’t want to track the record in the city,” Hunting explains.

“Everything was shut down, so operating out of the city would have been hard back then. We just kind of did it the only way we could.”

The pair were so enjoying their writing sessions at Lake Almanor—which is four to five hours by car from the Bay Area—the idea arose to keep the recording literally in-house.

“Originally, [my house at Lake Almanor] was just going to be where we wrote the record,” Hunting says, “but Gary loved it up here and he was very inspired. He suggested we fly in some gear and record here.”

“The rest of us made our way up there around the middle of August, just to start listening to what was going together,” Souza continues.

“They were starting to plug [recording equipment] in in late August.”

With the world in lockdown, recording at Hunting’s house was an easy decision to make, and one that particularly suited the members of Exodus. “The best thing about this record—for me, anyway—was that we got back to going into the studio as a band and recording it as a

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EXODUS band,” Souza says. “We went up to Lake Almanor together and we rented a house, other than Tom’s house and compound, which we recorded at, and we stayed together. We ate dinner together. I know many bands who wouldn’t do it like that, because, at this point in their career or age, they don’t necessarily like or tolerate each other. We’re not like that. We have each other’s backs. There’s not a day or a few days that go by without band texts where everybody chimes in.”

“We barbecued and hung out,” Holt confirms.

“We still enjoy each other’s company; we call[ed] it Heavy Metal Summer Camp. And we were able to create the entire time, all the way through.

There was no end date on the recording sessions, because all of us were out of work. [Our engineer] Steve Lagudi, longtime Machine Head front-of-house engineer, he had no tours, so we had him there in the mountains with us, breathing smoke from wildfires.”

There’s nobody else that [Slayer] could have picked that would have done that justice like Gary [Holt] did it, because of his dedication to this music and being one of the inventors—

if not the inventor—

of this type of music.

Steve “ Zetro” Souza With no deadline for completion and no touring demands pulling at them, Exodus had the freedom and inspiration to create an album that perhaps only would have been possible in such circumstances. “I think this record is special,” says Hunting. “We’re happy with the end result and what we created. The only thing we could control at that time was to make music, so that’s what we did. Everybody and their brother were recording during COVID, but I have to think that ours will crush everybody’s.” [Laughs] “We’re very proud of this album, very much so,” stresses Souza. “This one’s a home run. This is a really good heavy metal record. I listen to this record every day, and usually when I record a record, I’m like, I’m not gonna listen to this fucking thing ever again. But this album, I just

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love everything about it—it’s just so damn heavy and so in-your-face. The lyrical content is very heavy, the musical approach is very fast and in-your-face, and I think this is very much a career-defining moment for all of us. This album exemplifies what we’re about when all five of us are at our best.”

“I think this album has no holes whatsoever,” Holt agrees wholeheartedly. “That could be a boastful comment from one of its creators, but I think on this album every song is godlike. ‘Fires of Division,’ which is the second to last song on the album, Chuck Billy asked me why it was so deep, because it was his favorite song. I told him it’s because the whole album’s that way, bro.” [Laughs]

LEGENDS FALL when I COME TO CALL

Unfortunately, COVID was not the only extenuat-

ing factor that had an effect—consciously or subconsciously—on an album that the members of Exodus clearly have such strong feelings about. Holt, who had been dealing with (or perhaps not dealing with) a brutal case of tennis elbow, lateral epicondylitis, in both arms by getting cortisone shots every six months during his time in Slayer, finally had a reckoning with the kind of repetitive stress injury that could be a careerender for a guitarist.

“The last effective [cortisone shots] I got were before the writing and recording of [Persona],” says Holt. “But even then, when I was about to start rhythm tracks and was

getting guitar sounds, I moved some amps around and my right elbow started going a little south. Then I recorded the song ‘The Beatings Will Continue (Until Morale Improves)’—which has just savage down-picking—and I just blew it out, just destroyed it.

“I got through the whole album, and then I got another round of injections in December, and they lasted a month and a half. I finally got MRIs and my left [elbow] had two complete ligament tears and a near complete tendon tear; the right one not as bad. I was told by a doctor that I could avoid surgery, but that I would need to do aggressive rehab and physical therapy. So, I’ve been doing that and I’m actually playing guitar again. I didn’t play guitar from when we finished the album [in October], until about a month ago [late spring]. I didn’t pick up the guitar at all. It hurt too much to play.”

“We’re getting old, dude,” Hunting adds, “so we all have our moments of pain and suffering.”

Though his performance on Persona Non Grata is impressive, unbeknownst to Hunting at the time, he was sick with something potentially far deadlier than COVID. “When we did the album last summer, he didn’t have a diagnosis, but he was dealing with unexplained weight loss,” says Holt. “Tom’s a big guy. He’s like 6’ 4”, or whatever, and built like a lumberjack, and he was weighing less than me. We didn’t know what was wrong with him. It wasn’t until early this year that we figured that out—and he still just crushed this record.”

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EXODUS However—again keeping in mind that his own personal health issues were unknown at the time—Hunting had penned a poem about the numerous rock idols who had been passing in recent years. “All these legends kept dying—Tom Petty, Glenn Frey, David Bowie, all these classic rock dudes—so I started writing this poem and it turned into a song,” he explains.

Holt, who typically writes most of the lyrics (along with Souza), loved Hunting’s concept and helped bring it to life. “He’d told me when we were doing rehearsals and stuff that he had some lyrics he’d been working on for a long, long time,” Holt says. “It was just an idea he had, because there has been so much loss, you

I wasn’t emotionally prepared to go through with [the surgery].

I even called and tried to postpone it by a week or whatever,

In February 2021, with Persona Non Grata completed and the band waiting for confirmation of a release date from its label, Hunting was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the stomach, a treatable form of cancer if detected early.

Between March and June, he underwent four sessions of chemotherapy, which successfully shrank the tumor in his stomach, and in July he had a full gastrectomy, where his entire stomach and surrounding lymph nodes were removed.

“I won’t lie—I wasn’t emotionally prepared to go through with [the surgery],” Hunting tells us three weeks after the successful procedure.

“I even called and tried to postpone it by a week or whatever, so I could cram one more steak in there, or one more burrito or half a pizza. [Laughs] But they had me in a good spot, because the chemo did its job and shrunk the tumor, and I was kind of in a sweet spot for the surgery. So, they talked me into it, and I’m glad they did it. They were able to get it all [the cancer]. I’m grateful.”

“He has been [positive] from the get-go,” Holt says. “He told me, ‘I’m gonna kick this thing’s ass. I’m gonna beat it like a snare drum.’”

“Tom is beating this, by the way,” affirms Souza. “Tom is just kicking its ass right now. He’s the strongest motherfucker I’ve ever met in my life. That dude literally chops wood up in the mountains all day long. He trains like Rocky; he’s a very strong individual.”

“Dude, there’s a curveball around every corner,” Hunting says about his mental approach

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during this scary time. “You’ve just gotta keep swinging, man.” [Laughs] All that remains for Hunting to get a clean bill of health is four more rounds of chemo, and tests to confirm he’s cancer-free. He’ll also have to adjust to the permanent physical changes to his body, most notably the loss of his stomach. “I’m relearning my relationship with food—smaller portions, more often, spaced out, liquid in between,” he explains. “I think after six months, the small intestine actually becomes your stomach and expands so you can eat more normal portions, and I’ll only need to eat three meals a day [at that point].”

While recovering his strength and stamina, as well as his overall health post-chemo, Hunting will temporarily relinquish his drum duties to former Exodus drummer John Tempesta. “It’s more important that I get strong now,” he says of the difficult decision. “I know that I’ll get behind the kit sooner rather than later, because I’m feeling better every day and doing more stuff every day. I’m just going slow and letting my body dictate how to get back into the swing of things.”

THE SUM of ALL YOUR FEARS

In a darkly ironic twist, one of the standout

tracks on Persona Non Grata is an old-school, Accept-like pounder, with lyrics written by Hunting, called “The Years of Death and Dying.”

Hunting’s last lyrical contribution came 35 years previous on Exodus’s debut, Bonded by Blood.

so I could cram one more steak in there, or one more burrito or half a pizza.

Tom Hunting

know, people who have been inspirations to us, or friends to us. He gave us an idea he had, the title and everything, and it took him forever, with a bit of help, to finish the lyrics. They were great. I kept kind of guiding him, because he’d get kind of indecisive on it, because it’s not his usual lane. And we added a couple little nods. We were working on this album and fucking Eddie Van Halen dies, so we put the little nod to him, referring to him as ‘the eruption.’ We put in a nod to Neil Peart, ‘bid farewell to kings,’ a little subtle wordplay. It was really great; it’s one of my favorite songs on the album.”

Hunting, of course, has no intention of being part of that list of the fallen, but he’s not the only member of Exodus who’s been considering their mortality a whole lot more than the band of ragers who recorded Bonded by Blood 36 years

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

EXODUS ago likely ever did. Last June, Holt announced via an Instagram post that he’d quit drinking. “I woke up and just felt like total fucking shit, like hung over,” Holt says of the apparent sudden (very public) decision he made. “I’m kind of a control freak nowadays, and getting a little too drunk, to me, is the same thing as losing control of something. And I don’t like the feeling.”

As has been the case for many, Holt found his alcohol intake increased significantly during the pandemic. “This whole year I’ve been drinking way more than I normally would, even on tour, or anything,” Holt admits. “[I’m] not unusual; there are a lot of us—pandemic drinking, you know? I just decided I was going to quit drinking. I’m 57; I’ve been partying since high school.

I quit smoking, I quit doing drugs—this is easy.”

Holt has plenty of support around him regarding this decision. His wife, Lisa, is also sober, and his bandmates, for the most part, won’t be any source of temptation on the road. “Three-fifths of Exodus don’t drink at all,” he says. “Zetro doesn’t drink, Jack doesn’t drink, and Tom’s cancer diagnosis has brought on a lot of changes.”

“Now it’s pancakes and chocolate milk and movies in the back of the bus,” Souza adds, unironically.

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Souza, however, may not be having as many pancakes and glasses of chocolate milk while Exodus is on the road this fall with Testament and Death Angel on the U.S. iteration of the Bay Strikes Back tour. During the pandemic, the once-chunky vocalist dropped a significant amount of weight. “I went on a 1,200-caloriea-day diet during the pandemic and lost 65 pounds,” he explains, “and it’s all because of the album cycle. I want to go out and just destroy people live. I’m running seven miles a day. I’ve really got this thing going on.”

“He looks fantastic and he’s ready to fight,” says Holt. “He’d had enough and wanted to get in fighting shape. He worked his ass off.

That’s what we’re all doing right now; we’re just trying to get in fighting shape because the album’s such a fucking war machine. Someone’s gotta command it.”

There’s little doubt that Exodus are excited about Persona and champing at the bit to get back out on the road, but their motivations for such dramatic life changes are a little more complicated than that. “I never thought about the clock ticking before, but the clock is sure ticking,” Souza says. “Right now I’m on the back nine.

I’m about two-thirds through [life] and just want

to stay healthy and aware—this is when you get Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer—because we’re all in the zone. If you’re in your 50s, you have hit the zone. I’m watching so many of my friends go. I’m losing a ton of them left and right, and they’re my age. I don’t want to end up on that list. I’ve got a record coming out and I want to rock this one.”

Holt’s not ready to go, either, nor is he ready to lose any of his bandmates. He and Hunting may not be pulling any more heists at Alpha Beta stores, but Exodus—this band that nearly every major branch of the thrash family tree can be traced back to, from Metallica and Slayer to Testament and beyond—shares a bond that is, decade after decade, expressed via consistently genre-defining albums. Their bond isn’t literally blood, but it’s about as close as it gets, which is why, well into their fourth decade as friends and bandmates, their personal relationships are as important as their musical one.

“One thing about Exodus, all these years later,” says Holt, “we’re still a band of brothers.

We fucking love each other—the ex-members love each other. Even the ones that didn’t quite so much at one time.”

WWW.BYNORSESTORE.NET

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INSIDE ≥

74 APPARITION The ghost with the most 76 CRADLE OF FILTH Thirteen albums and an intro

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

82 LUCIFER › Puscifer 82 MASSACRE No Concrete Blonde cover this time?

86 PRAY U PREY Find your own methods

Chef’s Kiss

NOVEMBER

ARCHSPIRE deliver all the tech that’s fit to play. And eat.

15

Please

12

Get

5 1

9

Fucking

Vaccinated

T

his is ridiculous, but ridiculous in the best sense of the word. Hear me out: As Archspire’s members have taken to online cooking shows in lieu of live gigs, let’s use a food analogy: Listening to Bleed the Future evokes feelings simiARCHSPIRE lar to those when your server emerges from the kitchen with Bleed the a plate of nachos piled three times as high as you imagined Future upon ordering. You don’t know how you’re going to tackle it, SEASON OF MIST where you’re going to put it or how long it’s going to take, but you’re going to have hella fun trying! ¶ Already darlings of the tech-death scene, Archspire have risen to the challenge of extended time off and expectations following 2017 breakthrough Relentless Mutation. In the case of Bleed the Future, this means more EPM (“everything per minute”), but the British Columbia hosers have also advanced their songwriting strategy to emerge with something beyond displays of inhuman skill. The integration of automatic-weapon-fire-picking and hummingbird-wing snare abuse in “Drain the Incantation” is surprisingly infectious,

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

DECIBEL : NOVEMBER 2021 : 73

as are “Acrid Canon” and “A.U.M.,” both of which are so stupidly fast and catchy that astonished giggling from gawping mouths becomes the best and most understandable reaction.

Jaws will be unhinged listening to Oli Aleron vocalize like Mike Patton wrestling a Yeti while wired on caffeinated speed. But listening to him do it locked into the hooks of “Golden Mouth of Ruin” and “Reverie on the Onyx”—to say nothing of the choppy jackhammering, rollercoaster tempos, languid basslines and elliptical arpeggios of the ironically titled “Abandon the Linear”—is ludicrous finery that will put smiles on faces while pureeing brain matter. It makes us wonder if the quintet’s songwriting process involves throwing out increasingly preposterous ideas. (Squeezing as many notes into a measure before bursting? Sure! Testing the durability of the extensor tendons in drummer Spencer Prewett’s forearms and shins? Why not? What classical/nursery rhyme/TV theme song can be snuck in at 300 miles an hour before anyone notices? Fuck yeah!). Try and explain the Malignancy-meets-Mumakil-meets-Mastodon-meetsMelt-Banana-meets-Mozart throwdown of “Drone Corpse Aviator,” not to mention closer “A.U.M.” opening with a sample of some dude talking shit about them as anything but.

If you’ve been scorecarding the past few issues, our review section has called out a variety of tech-death wizards for failing to temper musical prodigiousness with equitable amounts of songwriting smarts. On the flip side, Bleed the Future not only sets a standard for absurd displays of intricacy and technique, but shows that there’s fun in them thar hills; that there is smiling in death metal beyond Immolation’s in-studio pics and Erik Rutan ordering a burrito at Taco Bus in St. Pete. Ultimately, though, Bleed the Future demonstrates how to infuse a mindfuck with something that’ll nestle in your earholes the same way those heaping nachos will settle in your digestive system for days afterwards.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

ADARRAK

7

Ex Oriente Lux SELF-RELEASED

Youthinsingapore

You gotta hand it to Singapore’s Adarrak; they’re plucky. This death metal trio didn’t bother to release a demo or lock in a drummer before releasing their full-length debut, Ex Oriente Lux. No sooner is the damn thing out than they hit up Decibel for a review—well, senpai noticed. And senpai says, “Pretty good for a first stab.”

A trio consisting of guitarist Emanuel George Bi, bassist Zigor Muñoz and vocalist Gustavo 74 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 1 : D E C I B E L

Valderrama, Adarrak play the kind of steelbrushed melodic death metal you couldn’t escape in the early aughts, albeit with a little more flash and style in the solo department. So much flash and style, in fact, that they tapped Marty Friedman for a guest guitar solo on “Bereft,” one of the better tracks on the album.

That said, pretty much every tune on Ex Oriente Lux works. The band knows how to shift from aggressive to contemplative and back without sacrificing momentum, and they never let their prominent chops get in the way of a good melody—that’s half the battle right there.

The other half, though, is nailing little details, and there Adarrak have some room to improve. Session drummer Robin Stone’s rhythms are workmanlike, but these songs could benefit from a few months of drilling with a dedicated percussionist to make the transitions pop. Valderrama’s growls are on-point, but his melodic singing doesn’t quite hit the Nevermore heights he’s obviously aiming for. These are things that only happen when musicians spend plenty of time in a room together, hashing things out—a dicey proposition mid-COVID. Here’s hoping Adarrak get the chance to do so when writing their follow-up. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

ALCHEMY OF FLESH 7 Ageless Abominations

REDEFINING DARKNESS

Sincerest form of fatality

There’s a great old bit by the comedian Todd Barry in which he recounts a conversation with the manager of some hip new band. She tells him the group sounds like “a combination of Weezer, Green Day and Buddy Holly.”

Barry retorts: “Oh… so they sound like Weezer.”

It’s a joke that springs to mind when perusing the press materials for Alchemy of Flesh’s Ageless Abominations: “For fans of all eras of Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal and Nile.”

Oh, so they sound like Morbid Angel.

Yes, indeed. Specifically, Morbid Angel circa Formulas Fatal to the Flesh (1998) and Gateways to Annihilation (2000). It’s not super subtle— there’s a song here called “Slipgates to Annihilation” and Gateways, of course, has a track entitled “Ageless, Still I Am,” which seems to be about… an ageless abomination. Then there’s “Lava Storm,” artwork by Morbid Angel founding drummer Mike Browning (Nocturnus AD) and a note that Tim Rowland—the band’s sole instrumentalist member; a truly stunning feat considering the intricate heft of the sound— uses the “same model Ibanez Universe 7 string and Marshall JCM900 that the legendary Trey Azagthoth is known for using.”

Don’t hate Rowland for loving, though: Ageless Abominations pulls off its tribute beyond flawlessly. There’s a lot of vital death metal life running through Rowland’s veins, and the manner in which he bleeds it out, compositionally speaking, is wholly satisfying and invigorating.

The riffs and rhythms are so ridiculously on point, the expanse of Rowland’s Morbid palette so vast…well, it’s a complete fucking joy to swim around this swirly, heaving lava pit if you love any of the records mentioned above. And let’s face it: Like Rowland, almost all of us certainly do. —SHAWN MACOMBER

APPARITION

8

Feel

P R O FO U N D LO R E

Making sense of death/doom

When Californian newcomers Apparition released their 7-inch debut (Granular Transformation), it was a two-track sample of some of the year’s most punishing death/doom.

The quartet returns a year later with a fulllength on Profound Lore to deliver on the promise of their brief introduction.

Feel emerges as 34 minutes of bludgeoning riffs and dusky ambience. The monosyllabic title is deceptive in its simplicity. Feeling can of course be both a physical and emotional sensation. Certain passages—like the opening and closing charges of “Perpetually Altered”—rely on bruising physicality. But there’s also a visceral aura of horror felt within the catacombs of the psyche. The album is certainly most comfortable sloshing through the mud and the blood. But a song like the perfectly titled “Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness” also resonates with memories of amplified misery.

Apparition have scrapped most of the cavernous reverb from their EP, and the result from producer Taylor Young is old school in its ground ‘n’ pound mentality. Gorgutsian discord permeates the record (“Nonlocality” and the title track), but the deconstructed melodies never supplant the dominant death/doom.

While some of the members have studied jazz, those influences don’t surface in obvious ways.

“Entanglement” is the exception. After an eerie prelude to heaviness, the song erupts into progressive tempo shifts and a multi-chaptered hellscape. It’s the band’s finest hour, occurring right before the title track pounds the coffin nails into the record’s conclusion.

Feel doesn’t use any tropes or shortcuts to create the album’s palpable dread. Apparition embody the subgenre’s strengths via crushing cacophony imbued with subtle sophistication.

—SEAN FRASIER

Why no t tr y the Svart web sho p?

w w w. svartrecord s . com

GREEN LUNG

Black Harvest | LP/CD/Digi

The folk horror-obsessed UK fivesome re-emerges from their mulchy catacombs armed with dozens of freshly-whittled riffs. Black Harvest, the sequel to the groundbreaking debut album Woodland Rites, is a more colourful reimagining of the band’s sound - Dawn of the Dead to its predecessor’s Night of the Living Dead.

SKEPTICISM

Companion | LP/CD/Digi

Finnish Funeral Doom pioneers Skepticism celebrate their 30th anniversary with the release of their sixth full length album Companion.

Companion takes the listener on a journey from Skepticism’s gloomy past through to a monument of a band that has weathered their liturgy for 3 decades of mournful service.

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ATRÆ BILIS

8

Apexapien

20 BUCK SPIN

New wave of new school?

—JONATHAN HORSLEY

BLOOD RED THRONE

7

Imperial Congregation NUCLEAR BLAST

New blood on an old throne

After more than two decades of driving, proficient, serviceable-if-not-always-exhilarating modern death metal carnage, Blood Red Throne had well and truly lulled greater metaldom into a sense of security that Imperial Congregation proves falser than a suburbanite shredder picking up corpsepaint at Sephora. That’s right, 10 full-lengths into their career, the Norwegian 76 : NOV EMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

CRADLE OF FILTH, Existence Is Futile

7

In the garden of Hellish delights | N U C L E A R B L A S T

For decades, British blasphemers Cradle of Filth have been known by many extreme metal fans for what they’re not rather than what they are. They’re no longer the vampyre-fanged black/death bloodletters of their seminal albums. With hindsight, their cover of Iron Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name” on certain editions of Cruelty and the Beast was a harbinger of change. While retaining their Hammer Horror allure, the band started straying closer to Powerslave than To Mega Therion.

Existence Is Futile is the band’s 13th LP, and it’s an exploration of modern existentialism wrapped in uneven Gothic grandiosity. At times, Cradle of Filth’s blend of disparate genres feels like blackened power metal.

There’s a willingness to indulge high drama.

Guitars that tell stories. You can imagine clean wails instead of Dani Filth’s rasps over “How Many Tears to Nurture a Rose?” Like

quintet is apparently no longer content with swimming around the second-tier depths, breaking through to the surface with a collection of songs that frequently displays a newfound bouncier, catchier approach to groove, and a sensibility as close to pop as extreme metal gets.

So, what does that mean in practice? Well, you could think of Imperial Congregation as Blood Red Throne’s Vulgar Display of Power or Countdown to Extinction moment. Or compare it to that little rubber hammer the doctor uses to check your reflexes—i.e., a tool wielded in such a way that involuntary movements are inevitable.

(That chin-led head bounce is gonna happen whether you like it or not.) Add to this the fact that some of the band’s more recognizable elements—particularly the lead work and

its predecessor, 2017’s Cryptoriana, when the album’s mix surrenders to the twin guitars of Richard Shaw and Ashok, it truly shines.

When extreme bands employ plentiful keyboard parts and orchestral flourishes, it’s usually at the expense of the guitars. That’s the case with Existence Is Futile, where synths distractingly punctuate “The Fate of the World on Our Shoulders” and “Crawling King Chaos.”

Later, the keys caressing “Necromantic Fantasies” instill a lushness of earthly delights before the guitars drag the song to the hell beneath black soil. From the spoken word of Hellraiser’s Doug Bradley to the contributions of guest-singing succubi and three haunted instrumental interludes, all the band’s signature elements emerge from the fog. Sure, sometimes Cradle of Filth are a tablespoon of blood when a teaspoon will do. Existence Is Futile is rife with pulpy pomp and midnight majesty, which suits them—as they are, not what some want them to be—just fine. —SEAN FRASIER

vocals—are executed with a more interesting, diverse attack than previously seen and Imperial Congregation quickly scales the rungs toward one of the more welcome surprises of the year.

Whether you love Blood Red Throne or have taken a breather for the last several releases, a second look is absolutely warranted. It’s a new high plasma mark, for sure. —SHAWN MACOMBER

CASSIUS KING

7

Field Trip

NOMAD EEL

Tony, meet Ronnie James Dio

In this case, that’s six-string Jersey cottage industry Dan Lorenzo of power

PHOTO BY JAMES SHARROCK

Atræ Bilis’ bludgeoning death metal sound is a discordant whirlwind of precision battery, rhythm guitar jujitsu and sullen melodies culled from the post-apocalyptic post-metal songbook. Such is the detail in Luka Govednik’s drum patterns, in the unerring physics of David Stepanavicius’ monstrous guitar, that we might be of a mind to describe them as technical. But in death metal circles, that word comes with some baggage, and this Canadian quartet has the good sense not to over-egg the polyrhythmic pudding in search of the 24/7 action-metal spectacular. Sure, there are many jaw-dropping moments, set-piece arrangements of awe-inspiring venom, but as on Atræ Bilis’ sensational 2020 EP, Divinihility, there are also passages where they dial back the tempo, painting in blackened grays and washed-out blues—epic moments to deepen the audience’s emotional appreciation of the record, even at the risk of it losing some of its forward thrust.

It is a risk worth taking. This is the tension at the heart of Apexapien; the hypertrophied riffs and Jordan Berglund’s bestial vocals on one side, and the musically progressive instinct to widen out the canvas. The dissonant clang and off-kilter meter can give Atræ Bilis a freeform quality, but often they’re just straight-up remorseless, as on “By the Hierophant’s Maw,” a bona fide face-ripper of protean mega-chug, or “Into the Seas of Sepsis,” a track with a morbid groove seemingly engineered to launch stage-divers from a wedge monitor.

Somehow, Atræ Bilis hold our primal instincts and intellectual curiosity in perfect equilibrium—death metal for brain and soul alike. That takes imagination and talent.

Chin-strokers and headbangers, unite! Here’s a fresh set of jams we can all get down to.

metal locus Hades, and Austin institution Jason McMaster, merc(y)ful throat wraith for Watchtower, Dangerous Toys, Evil United and more.

That relegates Jimmy Schulman to the Geezer Butler bass chair and, in the role of Ward/ Appice, drum fill Ron Lipnicki, both men doom riders in Vessel of Light with Lorenzo (not to mention crooner Nathan Opposition of ex-ATX/ now-Cleveland rock Satanists Ancient VVisdom).

A family tree straight out of Mirkwood, that Cassius King.

Pleasingly thick, Field Trip commandeers an OG bus to the Dio museum beginning with number-two hitter and right in the title, even, “Cleopatra’s Needle,” a snaking, biting, Whitechapel cut-up. McMaster’s vocal versatility tickles the cochlea line by line, his metallic classicism treading truly “ha-llow-ed ground,” as he intones on said Egyptian tattoo. On opener “King of Lies,” he relishes repeating the title phrase— king of lyes, king of l’eyes, king. of. lies.

Not all of them hit, of course. “Below the Stones” and “Join the Exodus” strike out in the crucial third and cleanup spots, but Mob Rules crawler “Traveler (The Long Road)” rises to the occasion, and “I Move With the Moon” burns Iommi’s proverbial cross on a red-hot ‘n’ lit strangler riff that McMaster straddles like an exsanguinating bull after the picadors are finished with it. Throw longest cut “Six” on that same pyre as Lorenzo bends yet more steel into barbed wire constriction. Its delicious drag-anddelay on a wizard’s yarn spanning lifetimes delivers McMaster’s best vocal catwalk, his near aside early on, “without a soul,” leaning in with a leering wink. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

DUEL

8

In Carne Persona H E AV Y P SYC H S O U N D S

Weapons are choice

Catalog topography maps peaks and valleys. Classic rock quartet Duel drove a Come and Take It flag deep into the pinnacle of 2019’s Valley of Shadows, which solidified the Austin longhairs as international festival favorites. The fifth release and fourth studio LP in their five-year rise, In Carne Persona, stares down the age-old music quandary—summit reached, where to next?

“Equal or better” answers that for any group cresting its discography, and indeed, this protometallic blade from Italian foundry Heavy Psych Sounds levels up to its predecessor relative to the relationship between Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic and Rocks. The former peaks compositionally, but the latter liquifies song and sound into a far greater whole. Duel eschew glammy cock rock for doom-licked NWOBHM 78 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

HARD-WIRED TO MR. SELF-DESTRUCT

G

OST’s 2019 hard left (hand path) turn, Valediction, felt unsure of itself—with one foot in the darksynth and harsh industrial/black metal sounds that vaulted him to prominence, and the other tentatively trying to find a toehold in a new (Depeche) mode, it never quite clicked. Rites of Love and Reverence [ C EN TUR Y MEDIA] ties it all together by committing to full arena goth. James Lollar finds the perfect vessel by tapping into the evergreen subject of women’s liberation through witchcraft. That allows him to unleash giant beats and giant hooks on latex-clad bangers like “Blessed Be” and “A Fleeting Whisper.”

J.G. Thirlwell has scraped a lot of projects off his wheels during his long career (Foetus, Steroid Maximus, composer for Venture Bros. and Archer, etc.), and while XORDOX for sure isn’t the weirdest, it may be one of the most surprising. Omniverse [EDITION S MEG O ] , his second release under that moniker, combines the evocative swooshes of big-budget ’80s synth scores by the likes of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis with the low-budget beats of early techno pioneers like John Mills—all filtered through his own bent compositional POV. Thirlwell’s guide to the omniverse takes the listener to all its scariest places.

While prog metal weirdos HAIL SPIRIT NOIR would normally fall under the regular review section, Mannequins [ B A N DCA MP ] expands the atmospheric synth sounds from Eden in Reverse into a full-length imaginary movie soundtrack for a one-off project that showcases their Carpenter Brut-al side. I’d accuse them of being cybernetic carpetbaggers if they weren’t so damn good at it. By combining obvious influences with pomp rock swagger, they make devilish dance tunes like “Enter Disco Inferno” total treats. They claim it isn’t a permanent style change, but I wouldn’t be mad if it was.

God in the Machine [ FIX T N EO N ] finds the annoyingly handsome British darksynth producer DEADLIFE staying the course eight full-lengths in. His penchant for sexy robot ladies and sinister slamming remains intact. Richer depth and an embrace of his unabashed love for EDM help set this apart from the pack without losing its appeal for those who want a straight-up synthwave fix.

statliness, but the skyrocket arc here leaves its precursor high on a mountainside as it fearlessly steps off and into the grand canyon of ’70s hard rock ecstasy.

“You’ll floor Valley of Shadows off the lot like Jim Rockford’s Pontiac Firebird,” opined these pages previously; so, by that measure, In Carne Persona rolls in off a Formula 1 track. Speed hardly enters the equation past the Powerslave gallop of “Bite Back,” but in surety and sonic delivery, this sucker launches and never looks back.

Frontman Tom Frank possesses a God Says No intonation, so every line sounds delivered from the mount (“Children of the Fire”). Meanwhile, black steed bass from Shaun Avants and

Justin Collins’ give-chase beat amp up combustible licks from lead guitarist Jeff Henson (“Anchor”). Supreme highlight “Dead Eyes” hooks as deep and fast as a ’77 FM staple.

In Carne Persona, yesterday’s gemstone today.

—RAOUL HERNANDEZ

FERAL SEASON

6

Rotting Body in the Range of Light P R O FO U N D LO R E

Scandi-maybe-not

When I listen to black metal that touts itself as “Scandinavian” despite

obviously being from somewhere else, I really dig deep to see if these acolytes of style truly capture the magic that group of shitty Norwegian teenagers managed to capture in the early ’90s. I know what you’re thinking: Is this guy serious? Is he really about to place a new album side-by-side with the classics?

Is that even fair? And you’re right, it kind of isn’t, but… everything is relative, especially with a young genre’s linear heritage, and when you tout yourself as having Scandinavian black metal as your backbone, things get a little messy and enter into a world of complexity.

What I’m saying is, new band Feral Season’s Rotting Body in the Range of Light isn’t bad; I just feel no magical spark when I listen to it. It exists and fulfills black metal’s tenets, but there are better examples of “finding black metal’s spark” now than this. When listening, I hear more of the Pacific Northwest-style “hypnotic and harmonic” black metal style (don’t call it “Cascadian”), and a smattering of the post-rock or even “slowcore” styles that made their way into some of the Bay Area bands in the early-2010s; which is fine, but it all feels sort of out of place, even in what is ultimately a flowing and competently composed album.

The big issue with it musically, beyond ideology or comparisons, is the lack of transitions between parts, which shows this duo’s doom metal genealogy. Just hit a big chord a few times or let a few chugs out before moving to the next riff, it’ll be fine. If anything, the classics told us to simply throw riffs in a blender and avoid these kinds of blunders. I’m not going to say this is a bad album, because it really isn’t terrible; it just doesn’t spark joy and simply exists. —JON ROSENTHAL

FOTOCRIME

7

Heart of Crime P R O FO U N D LO R E

Post-pandemic punk

Imagine you’re pouring your heart and soul into your second album of synth-sensual electrogoth, and on the week it’s due to drop, the world goes into lockdown. Forget that your all-important touring promo is out the window; the album is an album to have sex to and no one is going within six feet of each other. C’est la vie, shrugged one-man punk powerhouse Ryan Patterson—in true Europhile style—and headed back to the studio. The result is album nummer drei—that’s aptly German—as Heart of Crime is a darker, grittier affair littered with motoric drums and leather-clad electronica.

A self-confessed DIY quarantine project— while its predecessor boasted live drums by Steve Albini—this outing is recorded and 80 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

mixed by the ex-Coliseum frontman himself.

When he does invite guests, such as the gorgeously shoegazey Janet Morgan on the brooding “Crystal Caves,” they let the light into Patterson’s cracked vision. The Leonard Cohen reference is apt, as Fotocrime no doubt draws from any of the donned-in-black troubadours in any discerning vinyl freak’s collection, but Patterson’s not too cool to show off his love of Pet Shop Boys alongside Neu! and Jesu.

On the album’s standout, stoic dancefloor filler (by dance, we mean “stand in the shadows and nod sporadically”), Patterson invites us to meet him at the “Electric Café,” which we take to be a codename for yet another Zoom call, but hopefully we can meet IRL soon and be too cool to dance at his live shows once again. —LOUISE BROWN

GUHTS

8

Blood Feather SELF-RELEASED

Self-referencing for shits, giggles and insanity

Much of the advance word on the street concerning the debut EP from this Big Apple-based powerhouse concerns the parallels between vocalist Amber Burns and the coquettish operatic insanity of Julie Christmas’ vocals during her Battle of Mice days. And while Burns definitely sounds like she’s toeing an unsteady line between headlining a black-tie affair and howling at the moon from a padded cell, this particular hack’s eye and ear also cottoned on to how Blood Feather dredges up feelings on par with the monikers of the members’ other bands.

Featuring members of Witchkiss, Bask and Black Mountain Hunger, the existence of Guhts is quizzical considering those bands all appear to still be active. But creative juices don’t stop flowing in the face of global pandemics, and when you take away shows and tours, shit’s still gonna get done. For Guhts, getting shit done includes exorcising demons through the medium of sludgy post-metal that simulates the eerie sensation of an evil crone whispering last rites before delivering an icy kiss of death (“The Mirror”), being strapped to a sunbaked boulder and made to suffer through New Oregonian summer temperatures sans sunscreen and hydration (“Eyes Open”), and gasping for sustenance after struggling up the side of an unforgiving slab of geology (“The Forest”).

Granted, Burns’ voice, as caterwaulingly demonic as it is, sometimes loses impact by wavering out of key during the soundscape-y sections, which themselves border on gritty unease and the need of a good tuner. However, these are bearable growing pains in Guhts’

combination of post-metal elegance, grimy doom/sludge and the resulting schizophrenia of double-tracking a vocalist who sounds like the offspring of a banshee and screaming eagle.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

ILLT

6

Urhat INDIE RECORDINGS

No, it’s YOUR hat

A band featuring Bjorn “Speed” Strid (Soilwork), Karl Sanders (Nile), Kjell Karlsen (Chrome Division) and Dirk Verbeuren (every band, including some of the above) would be considered a supergroup in almost any scenario—except, funnily enough, this one. Illt belongs to Roy Westad, a Norwegian guitarist who makes his living composing music for Norwegian films and TV shows you’ve never heard of. Everybody else? Pure hired guns. But damn, if you’re gonna hire guns, might as well get the metal equivalent of the Magnificent Seven.

Westad’s debut, Urhat, proves he’s not fucking around when it comes to his entry into the extreme metal world—besides getting a murderer’s row of session musicians, he also hired Kurt Ballou to mix and Alan Douches to master. So, it won’t be much of a surprise to learn that this thing sounds great. There’s one thing Westad couldn’t farm out: the songwriting. That’s the real test. And tunes like “Scythian King” and “Blood of the Unbeliever” deliver the blackened melodeath goods, complete with unexpected chord changes and some nicely melodic solos.

If you’re into latter-day Darkthrone or early Soilwork, Urhat provides a diverting 36-minute headbanging session. That said, there ain’t much here that sticks after the record stops spinning.

Westad clearly knows how to put together a professional product. It’s just one that doesn’t really stand out from the rest of the professional products on the shelf. —JEFF TREPPEL

LVCIFYRE

8

The Broken Seal DARK DESCENT

Someone needs their nails trimmed

Londonites Lvcifyre are coming out strong with the follow-up to 2019’s 22-minute Sacrament EP. New album The Broken Seal continues their high-intensity, brutally unrepentant death metal assault. Much like countrymen Grave Miasma, Cruciamentum and Vacivus, the Brits have excised the middling qualities of their predecessors (Cancer, Impaler, Gomorrah) for a far more confrontational disposition. That

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MASSACRE

5

Resurgence

NUCLEAR BLAST

Back from beyond and back

8

Don’t fear the what now? | C E N T U R Y M E D I A

Over the past decade, Johanna Sadonis has been flirting with a winning formula, first with the Oath and then with Lucifer.

Ever since she partnered with Hellacopters/ Entombed great Nicke Andersson in 2017, though, Lucifer have been on a steady ascent thanks to compositions that honed the band’s deliberately vintage sound. Sadonis’ pursuit of an aesthetic that accurately captures early-’70s heavy metal and psychedelia has led to the odd brush with repetitiveness, but not only is Lucifer’s focus stronger on the appropriately named IV, but the band has opened up its sound to allow the singer to explore more.

The end result is the most vibrant album of Sadonis’ career and a creative breakthrough for the band. Lucifer’s sound is still rooted

there’s a fair application of black metal also helps to sharpen Lvcifyre’s spear.

While predecessors The Calling Depths (2011) and Svn Eater (2014) put U.K. death metal back on the proverbial map, the deleterious duo—vocalist/ guitarist/bassist T. Kaos and drummer Menthor—aren’t exactly prolific. The world of death metal was an entirely different landscape seven years ago, even with Teitanblood, Vader and Incantation holding lauded, abyssal forts fastly.

But Lvcifyre aren’t bowing to advances in death metal, offering instead to stay course, battering, frightening and encouraging bedlam with their blessed, beastly benefaction. From opener “Gods Await Us” and keystone “Headless Rite” to closer 82 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

in heavy, doomy blues—opener “Archangel of Death” is a prime example—but as great as those moments are, the real excitement is to be had on the more adventurous tracks. “Wild Hearses” is a delectable, Sabbath-adjacent love song for the doomiest of lovers (“Baby, take my hand / If this ain’t sacred I’ll be damned”) while “Crucifix (I Burn for You)” attracts gloomy listeners with Sadonis’s honeyed vocal hooks and “Bring Me His Head” approaches the psychedelic groove of Shocking Blue. There’s a sense of majesty that was missing on previous Lucifer records (“Mausoleum” and “Nightmare” are fine examples); the deeper this album goes, the more it feels as though that was the one piece of Lucifer’s demonic puzzle that was missing. After years of very good—if not excellent music—we can finally say Sadonis has a truly great record under her belt. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

“Black Mass,” The Broken Seal forgives little and demands everything. The tumult between is of no respite either. “Tribe of Khem,” “The First Archon” and the title track morbidly attack at angles grotesque and ruthless.

This is not single-based death metal for the YouTube generation. The Broken Seal is an experience in full only, the kind too easily relegated to the fringes of our ever-walking corpse of a genre. The hard-hearted hammering—performed with a headsman’s tact—is truly astounding to suffer through. Upon the altars of desolation, Lvcifyre fatally formulate the domination of your flesh with The Broken Seal.

Let the hot winds burn... —CHRIS DICK

MELVINS

8

Five Legged Dog IPECAC

Wait, is the fifth leg the doggy bone?

A career-spanning Melvins retrospective is long overdue. In order to span

PHOTO BY ESTER SEGARRA

LUCIFER, Lucifer IV

In The Walking Dead, the remaining humans often stumble upon “walkers” that turned around the start of the apocalypse.

The resilient undead are usually encased in overgrown trees or embalmed in swamp water. Nonetheless, they keep moving. Massacre are the death metal equivalent of these hardy zombies: They simply won’t die. The band started long before most of Decibel’s readership was born, even before Glen Benton was burning upside-down crosses on his forehead. Massacre have continued in fits and starts with different lineups despite time and global pandemics—their previous member list reads like a who’s who of Florida death metal.

If OG death metal is your thing, there’s a lot to embrace about their latest resurgence, which is titled Resurgence. The album features the same players who recorded their earliest material, including vocalist Kam Lee (Mantas, Bone Gnawer) and original bassist Mike Borders (missing is Terry Butler, who wisely left a terrible band/meme named Six Feet Under for Obituary, and founding guitarist Rick Rozz). Massacre say this record should be viewed as the rightful follow-up to their career highlight From Beyond, not a follow-up to Back From Beyond (2014).

Does it live up to past glories? While Resurgence doesn’t hit their early caveman death metal benchmark, it has its virtues. The playing is tight and energetic, and Massacre are as comfortable with slow, plodding metal as they are with high-tempo bruisers like “Servants of Discord.”

What drags the album down is that Massacre have carried along death metal baggage the genre abandoned long ago: cheesy, horror filmstyle song introductions, Lovecraft-lite lyrics and unnecessary atmospherics. The best OSDM bands have evolved across the board; not just as players, but as conceptualists and lyricists. Massacre have evolved and grown as players, but parts of this record traffic in death metal cliché.

That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find a metal genre that isn’t somehow limited by its adoration of what came before. You might not seek out Resurgence after hearing it once or twice, but you also wouldn’t turn it off. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

“…ADARRAK IS AN OVER THE TOP METAL BAND THAT EFFECTIVELY MIXES ELEMENTS OF OLD SCHOOL METAL WITH NEW AGGRESSIVE SOUNDS”

- MARTY FRIEDMAN

“…ADARRAK IS TRULY PROGRESSIVE SINCE THEY ARE NOT AFRAID TO IMPLEMENT ALL KINDS OF METAL INTO THE MIX”

- DAN SWANÖ

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a career like theirs, you need to cover a lot of ground—and Five Legged Dog crams 36 songs into two hours and 45 minutes. That’s like “Dream Theater concept album” long. Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover and current bassist Steven McDonald reinterpret their greatest non-hits here using acoustic instruments—a weird decision for sure. Melvins without the ugly is like Jethro Tull without the flute. Considering how much amplified arson they’ve committed over the years, it’s natural to wonder how the new versions stack up.

Thankfully, they don’t attempt Colossus of Destiny. They’ve mostly selected songs that lend themselves well to pulling the plug. Some of the chosen classics like “Queen” and “Anaconda” and more recent picks like “We Are Doomed” and “Don’t Forget to Breathe” had strippeddown arrangements already. Things get weirder when they bust out the doomy stuff like “Boris” or the groove metal freakout “Honey Bucket”— but they still find ways to ugly up the acoustic guitars. In some cases, like “Revolve,” the song even works better without the metal. The covers are equally fun—their sinister take on Alice Cooper’s “Halo of Flies” and their sunny rendition of “Everybody’s Talking” (featuring J.D. Pinkus on vocals) fits perfectly into their demented aesthetic.

An idiosyncratic way to celebrate an idiosyncratic career, Five Legged Dog can be overwhelming if absorbed in one sitting. If you sit down with each LP, however, you’ll discover that—like the titular canine—their songwriting really does stand on its own five legs. —JEFF TREPPEL

NATTMARAN

7

The Lurking Evil W I S E B LO O D

Rocking metal motherfucker Luddites take advantage of technology

Originally known as Unholy Tenebris, this international outfit did a moniker switcheroo when it became clear their newer material was doing its own switcheroo. The initial frosty and isolationist black metal made way for something more inclusive of balls-out rockin’ NWOBHM and early thrash/speed metal, with guitarist/bassist Michael Lang’s black metal roots bringing up the rear. After a handful of releases as Unholy Tenebris, a meeting between Swedish Lang and Indonesian vocalist Yogga Pratama at a Jakarta metal fest in the Before Times—and the drafting in of Japanese drummer Koji Sawada—Nattmaran was born. And suddenly, Venom, Midnight, Gehennah and Bulldozer had another pack of raging heshers looking up at them.

84 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

The above list of touchpoints should be a solid indication that The Lurking Evil isn’t very concerned with advancing metal into the future. In fact, it’s a solid bet these dudes spend as much time working on Nattmaran as they do building a time machine able to fire them back to 1982 Newcastle, with stops along the way at the mid-’80s West Coast speed metal scene, the garage where Bathory was recorded and Yasuyuki Suzuki [Abigail, Barbatos]’s Tokyo apartment, which is a time machine itself.

There’s an undeniable stripped-down energy summoning Razor’s Evil Invaders on “Necromancy” and Broken Bones on “Die by My Bullets.”

Countering that, however, is a guitar tone thinness that doesn’t jive with the overall intent, as Lang’s staccato riff style often comes up Trump in the battle against the loud, echoey vocal production. Then again, if you corralled Nattmaran into a proper studio, the result would likely be devoid of the spirit that drives the customer base who keeps the MDF bootleg shirt guys in business. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

NECROFIER

6

Prophecies of Eternal Darkness SEASON OF MIST

Your chiropractor’s worst nightmare

As recipes go, Necrofier’s seems like a pretty simple one to follow. You take a heavy foundation of Immortal’s Battles in the North and fold in a bit more melody à la Dissection’s The Somberlain. Ladle over a bed of working-class hostility (December Wolves) and finish with a light drizzle of Carpathian Forest-style campy horror keyboards. Ta-da! It’s fucking chow time.

Without question, there’s a tremendous audience for this type of fare, and I’m uninterested in criticizing Necrofier for playing so closely to type when—as I understand it—that was the aim of the project from inception. Reinterpretations of old favorites are fine. My issue with this record lies primarily around pacing/song structure, and most especially with a mix that proves to be frustratingly mutable depending upon what device you happen to be listening to the album on. On four out of five systems I tried, the mix is maddeningly ungainly, the guitars buried leagues below the drums and vocals giving the album a tedious, sallow quality, with only the groovier—and very effective—Craftlike mid-tempo sections providing any real sonic definition. Worse, the kit is pushed forward so brazenly that the drummer’s frequently dropped beats and miscalculated fills are impossible to ignore. (Admittedly, that distracting rhythmic restlessness and auditory hegemony has

precedence via Abbath’s triplet-dense, ad infinitum galloping on Immortal’s aforementioned third release, so perhaps what I’m experiencing as a bug is actually baked in by design.)

Necrofier demonstrate an undeniable knack for menace, atmosphere and melody. The songs themselves need a bit of fine-tuning; the drums need—I don’t know, maybe a spa day (they’re wound too tightly); and the band needs to seriously reconsider its production team for future efforts. Then perhaps, this prophecy will be fulfilled. —FORREST PITTS

NOLTEM

8

Illusions in the Wake TRANSCENDING OBSCURITY

Folk-be-gone

For a long time, I knew Noltem as a relic of my past, a single demo released through a music page before disappearing into obscurity. 2005’s Hymn of the Wood was a daring entry into the folky “dark metal” world, something calmer and more meditative than black metal, but still undeniably metallic and with its own brand of forested confidence. Re-emerging 10 years later with a new EP (Mannaz), drummer/vocalist John Kerr and guitarist/bassist Max Johnson’s continuation of the demo’s sound proved to be a memorable release, though a bit of an anachronism.

As it turns out, Noltem were far beyond their folk metal roots even at that point, and on new album Illusions in the Wake (now including bassist Shalin Shah), the world finally gets a glimpse into Noltem’s true, progressive form.

Relying on atypical progressions, varied riffing and a grand sense of atmosphere, Noltem’s debut full-length offers a greater sense of variation to the black metal to which their label touts as the band’s home. I’m going to try and not use the word “progressive” here, as Noltem aren’t necessarily a “prog” band, per se, but Illusions in the Wake’s uniqueness certainly sets them apart from black metal, if not most non-progressive extreme metal on the market.

Concentrating on a heavy emotive presence and a musicality that backs up their resplendence, Illusions in the Wake is an exciting album for something that challenges so many norms. The folk element still pops up here and there, but Noltem refuse to be placed into a single box beyond simply being “metal.”

There’s a lot to their sound, be it their songwriting’s—ahem—“progressive” nature, their refusal to fit into a single subgenre or the concentration on musicianship as much as atmosphere, Noltem’s first full-length is not one to miss. —JON ROSENTHAL

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

-Deaf Forever

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PRAY U PREY

8

The Omega Kill SELFMADEGOD

Parental Advisory: Explicit Everything

“It’s a shame that things have to turn into fashion,” vocalist Shrew opines during the Prophecy of Doom segment in the 1991 grindcore special issue of VHS “video magazine” Hard ‘N’ Heavy (that’s right, eat 30-year-old shit dust, you YouTuber Johnny-come-latelies). “Fashion-orientated. It’s a shame. But then again, if [in] this short period of time, people, whilst it’s in fashion, listen to it and appreciate it—perhaps learn from it—because they haven’t experienced it before… even as fashion goes, these thoughts, these feelings might stay.”

Despite a pair of killer full-lengths—Acknowledge the Confusion Master (1990) and Matrix (1992)—Prophecy of Doom never did become as fashionable as punk or grindcore scenes in general, but those thoughts, feelings and tippity-top-shelf grind/crust-infused death metal are abso-fucking-lutely runway-ready on the sophomore full-length from Shrew and his former Prophecy bandmate/guitarist, Shrub.

Unrelenting and diverse as capital-“H” Hell, Pray U Prey’s The Omega Kill sounds as if it were composed by predators driven to tear staid, boring riffs and expectations apart.

Each of the 12 songs is a standalone barrage of brutal brilliance—the work of lifelong master craftsmen who are beyond due for the acclaim and reverence they so clearly deserve.

And lyrically, tracks such as “Earth Roulette Wheel,” “Life Within the Reflection” and “Living Library” confirm that Shrew’s observations of the agony and potential of existence remain as gimlet-eyed as ever. So, let’s lead fashion by its finicky fucking nose rather than the other way around for once and make this prophecy the template for the future extremity the world needs now. —SHAWN MACOMBER

TENTATION

7

Le Berceau Des Dieux G AT E S O F H E L L

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The lineage of Frenchlanguage traditional heavy metal speaks for itself. ADX, Vulcain, Sortilège, Malédiction, Trop Féross, Demon Eyes, H-Bomb, Cauchemar, Herzel—herein lies ample vintage “fuck you” energy. It’s within this exact tradition that Tentation thrive; that throwback, galloping, traditional heavy metal sound is further elevated by their rural origins (the band formed in 2012 in “a 86 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

small village in the south of France” dominated by its medieval appearance). Infuse a dollop of classics worship—Iron Maiden and King Diamond, specifically—and you should have a general idea of their overall musical framework.

Within Le Berceau Des Dieux’s 10 tracks, you’ll find plenty of reference points. When things slow down partially through “Le Couvent,” the ominous keyboards and creepy voices cascading throughout have a decidedly King Diamond feel; the creepy cackles and blazing solos are a delightful addition. “Interlude” has gloomy, acoustic-Sabbathian vibes à la “Orchid”/“Laguna Sunrise.” Meanwhile, the howling wind introduction, gradually increasing speeds and the harmonized gang/chorus vocals on “Baldr” give the song a haunting vibe that is further elevated (once more) by shredding solos. In a perfect world, this is what constitutes a heavy metal ballad: morose, somber and emotional without sacrificing power.

Later, the keyboard-laden, almost synthwaveesque interlude “L’Enfant de Gosthal” paves way for the album’s strongest track “Heavy Metal,” which practically bursts from the speakers, courtesy of guest vocals from Patrice Le Calvez (Titan), Iron Jérémy (Iron Slaught) and Jey Deflagratör (Hexecutor). Altogether, Le Berceau Des Dieux is comforting and familiar, growing stronger with every listen. —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

WOMAN IS THE EARTH

7

Dust of Forever INIT

Shades of black

Now that black metal has permeated all music, you may not always know whether to expect the genuine article or just a band who likes to throw in blackened elements to grim things up. Woman Is the Earth certainly qualify as a black metal band, but it’s everything else on Dust of Forever where they’re really succeeding.

Since 2009, the South Dakotans have been winnowing down their songs from massive compositions to the relatively modest realm of five and six minutes, but they’ve left room to still incorporate a host of dynamics, which include traditional metal, sludge and prog-rock. Opener “Emerald Ash” is a great example of what the band is capable of, and “The Rope Gets Tighter” is where they really show the power of their range.

And the more that range is exhibited, generally, the better the songs are.

There are certainly heavy, triumphant and melancholy BM riffs on here, but the weakest parts of the record tend to be when the band

focuses too long and hard on the tremolo picking. This is both because they start to somewhat meld together and there’s also a lot of intricate, compelling drum work that loses out when relegated to consistent blasting.

In the end, this is a black metal band with an expanded musical vocabulary, and the usual fans should be plenty satisfied with Dust of Forever. But it’s hard not to think Woman Is the Earth could continue leaning further away from the genre and find richer results. —SHANE MEHLING

WORM

9

Foreverglade 20 BUCK SPIN

Transcendence into the commissural

From the depths of Floridian dankness, ancient diSEMBOWELMENT echoes and the haunting tendrils of Finland’s Dolorian, Worm arrive ameliorated and with an updated concordat. Not only have they paired up with revered indie 20 Buck Spin, but the grisly gathering of Fantomslaughter and Equimanthorn has borne decidedly more macabre fruit on new album Foreverglade. Previous LPs Evocation of the Black Marsh (2017) and Gloomlord (2019) only hinted at Worm’s stately, if purposefully decelerated madness. The terrifying (and mysterious) twosome have summoned an album that is genre-strident, curiously opaque and purposefully eldritch.

This nexus that Worm preside over is an unpleasant place. Glacially paced ghosts, wights and phantasms swirl, howl and haunt the minds of their victims into funereal, unbidden states. Truly, the title track, “Cloaked in Nightwinds” and “Centuries of Ooze” vociferate strongly, as if to beckon with bony fingers outstretched into another world. But Worm aren’t only caught in the unhurried tempest they created and have expanded upon on Foreverglade.

The prominence of Schuldiner/Malmsteenesque leads and woebegone harmonies (“Murk Above the Dark Moor,” “Subaqueous Funeral”) elevate Worm’s grave-borne music.

Furthermore, the scourge of the duo’s black metal origins aren’t on hiatus here. The incredible “Empire of the Necromancers” (perhaps an unwitting cousin to Septic Flesh’s “Pale Beauty of the Past”) slithers from creepy mythology and ridiculously great guitar hero antics (think Crypt of Kerberos’ “The Sleeping God”) into a fully-fledged necro groove right at the midway point.

There are too few albums that chill blood in 2021. Worm’s Foreverglade will, however, set hairs on end. And it’s extremely welcome. —CHRIS DICK

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

AL JOURGENSEN VS. GENE SIMMONS:

DISCUSS D

oug Rogers, very much his real name, leaned down and picked up a piece of dogshit.

Rogers was about 6’4” and 270 pounds. But when faced with Whipping Boy co-founder Steve Ballinger, who was also 6’4” and 270 pounds, Rogers felt like he needed a force multiplier. And the dogshit was it.

Specifically, eating it. A big ol’ chunk of it. The logic being, anyone who could understand how crazy you’d have to be to eat random dogshit could also probably appreciate that, if it came to a tussle—which is where their exchange was heading— you’d not want to mess with them.

It worked—if by “worked,” you mean a fistfight was avoided, but a conversation ensued: Was he crazy because he was eating dogshit, or was he NOT crazy because he knew that eating dogshit would save his ass?

I tended toward the latter, but standing around at Hustler magazine’s big 20th anniversary party in L.A. and talking to Al Jourgensen, I thought of this. Jourgensen peered over what appeared to be purple88 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

lensed glasses and, given that we both knew and had worked with Jello Biafra and Ian MacKaye, it seemed there was something to chat about between and betwixt watching porn stars toddle by.

But the peering turned into staring and eyes bugging, and within minutes—and for minutes—we were both just staring at each other.

They say that if you stare at someone longer than 14 seconds, you’re either going to have sex with them or fight with them, but I was in a jolly mood, so both seemed unlikely. So, we just… stared. People wandered by and wondered, but in my soul, I sensed that great mysteries would be revealed—eventually. Even if what happened eventually is someone came over and steered Al away. Silently, the distance between us was growing as the smiles remained.

Since I had just had a conversation with Timothy Leary where he touched his forehead to my forehead, Wesley Willis-style, and kept it there for the entire conversation concerning the genius of Larry Flynt, I figured maybe drugs were involved.

Drugs aside, though, the thought remained—crazy or high not mattering here—was he crazy for this dance of the eyes, or was he NOT crazy because the dance of eyes is the only thing that made this story worth repeating?

I lurched into the rest of the party. Inadvertently mocking Tommy Lee to his face. Being mocked by Buzzo to my face. And, Brooklyn kid to the bone, spying Gene Simmons and deciding that this would be the day that I talked to Gene Simmons.

“Hey man… big fan…” Something I’m quite sure he’s only heard forever.

Simmons pawed my hand in some version of a shake. His manner? Courtly. I make mention of the Brooklyn connection, how—to a certain degree—his music sort of changed my life at 13, and how I heard that he was thinking of starting a magazine and, if he needed help with it, I was all in.

He smiled and nodded and started talking about the magazine that he and his wife Shannon

Tweed were thinking of starting, right before the shadow of porn star Taylor Wane encroached on our little bit of Brooklyn.

She approached and what happened next was as masterful as it was beautiful, and I never thought anyone would use those words to describe a stiff arm, so let me be the first: Simmons stiff-armed me into the dead zone and, not being a hammerhead, I did what any smart person in my position would do: realize when you’re beat, laugh it off and move on.

Later at my hotel, crawling into my Beverly Hills bathtub that Larry Flynt had paid for, I considered the evening’s passage and weighed The Land of Rape and Honey versus Destroyer.

My conclusion: I should have been nicer to Tommy Lee. Generation Swine, no matter how much the rest of the world hated it, was not a bad record at all.

So: Sorry, Tommy.

Endnote: I was never invited to another Hustler party again. Ever.

Like never ever.

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