Decibel #225 - July 2023 by Red Flag Media

RULE BELL WITCH THEOF THREES THORR’S HAMMER DOMMEDAGSNATT HALL OF FAME

REFUSE/RESIST

REVIEWED

FLEXI DISC

INCLUDED

CREEPING DEATH PERSEKUTOR

BONGZILLA PUPIL SLICER DEATHGRAVE THULCANDRA NECROFIER SATURNUS

JULY 2023 // No. 225

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July 2023 [R 225] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8

metal muthas All hail

10 exclusive:

decibel magazine metal & beer fest: philly 2023 review Drunk on riffs... and beer

16 low culture Back in my day 17 no corporate beer A storm of lite

18 bongzilla Not your kids’ dab 20 thulcandra New wave of blackened heavy metal 22 deathgrave There goes the neighborhood 24 necrofier Heard loud and clear 26 blood ceremony What’s old is new again 28 vhs Be kind please don’t just rewind 30 saturnus Decade of introspection 32 pupil slicer Flowers bloom

features

reviews

34 bell witch Doomed forever

67 lead review Funeral doom darlings Bell Witch prove that time is on their side with the beginning of their new audio trilogy Future’s Shadow Part I: The Clandestine Gate

36 creeping death Bound to succeed 38 q&a: persekutor Masked frontman Vlad the Inhaler is makings sure you get shit-hammered on fun 42 the decibel

hall of fame Before the sunn rose on a new era of doom metal, Thorr’s Hammer crashed like lightning into the small scene of the Pacific Northwest for two shows and sole legendary release Dommedagsnatt

68 album reviews Records from bands that are already demanding to know next year’s Philly fest line-up, including Immortal, Metal Church and Xasthur 80 damage ink Drop like flies

Pure Relief COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY KATJA OGRIN

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. © 2023 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.

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REFUSE/RESIST

July 2023 [T225]

“I don’t even want to play this show.”

It’s November 12, 1996, and Justin Broadrick is clutching his guitar and kneeling on the tiniest of stages in Moosic, PA, telling me this a few minutes before Godflesh’s scheduled set time. His dread is palpable. Moments earlier, metallic hardcore upstarts Vision of Disorder obliterated a packed Sea-Sea’s—a shithole we locals less-than-affectionately referred to as “feces”—but they’ve already loaded out and taken most of the audience with them. There are maybe 20 of us left. Earlier in the tour, drummer Ted Parsons sustained a serious foot injury that required him to use crutches when he’s not performing. The tenuous relationship with Godflesh’s record label has only deteriorated since the quiet release of their fourth LP, Songs of Love and Hate, about three weeks earlier. Things are not going great. Did I mention there are like 20 people here? My largely uninspiring pep talk is a non-factor, as Godflesh take the stage and launch into the opening three tracks from Songs of Love and Hate. They crush. After the show, I accompany them to their fleabag hotel accommodations, where they smoke up and we shit-talk a select few of their then-labelmates. Justin remains gregarious well into the night, but still somewhat anxious about the road ahead. We watch an episode of CHiPs with the volume completely muted, and I leave before overstaying my welcome. A month later—despite a couple cancellations and one physical altercation with an opening act—Godflesh completed that run. It would be the band’s final U.S. tour for 18 years. They’ve been back here a few times since. The most memorable for me came when I booked them for the inaugural Los Angeles edition of Metal & Beer Fest in 2018: Justin and bassist Ben Green showed up 45 minutes before their set time, the former passing his social anxiety along to me for one fist-clenching evening! When Godflesh return to tour the States this month, it will be the first time since Justin’s autism diagnosis, a condition he discusses in great detail in this month’s fantastic cover story, courtesy of Dan Lake. I’m not sure knowing/understanding Justin’s circumstances would have made a grueling U.S. tour at extreme metal’s commercial low point any less uncomfortable, but it will hopefully help him when he faces the chaos that surely awaits.

PUBLISHER

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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Patty Moran

COPY EDITOR

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Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Emily Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Addison Herron-Wheeler Jonathan Horsley Courtney Iseman Neill Jameson Kim Kelly Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Cosmo Lee Jamie Ludwig Shane Mehling Tim Mudd Justin M. Norton Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Brad Sanders José Carlos Santos Joseph Schafer Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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Like (pack) rats  Our editor’s autographed Godflesh poster emerges from the closet for the first time since 2008

To order by phone: 1.215.625.9850 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST) To order by fax: 1.215.625.9967 To order online: www.decibelmagazine.com 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. Copyright ©2023 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited. PRINTED IN USA

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READER OF THE

MONTH

Ron Kaiser

West Berlin, NJ You recently attended the latest Philly edition of Metal & Beer Fest. What were your thoughts on the event?

As a seasoned veteran of the Metal & Beer Fest, it’s so great to have this in our city every year. And it’s something I look forward to, even with the inevitable hangover [courtesy of] all the breweries from all over the country! This year was so much fun, from bands such as Undeath and Frozen Soul (who I helped to book their first-ever Philly area shows). Seeing them grow in their relative short histories and play great fests like this is amazing. I FaceTimed my 16-year-old son during Eyehategod’s set since he wanted to see them. (In five years, he’ll be able to join us all there!) Gorguts, Drowningman and All Out War made me feel young

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again. The Black Dahlia Murder did a great job to honor Trevor Strnad’s legacy! The way Suicidal Tendencies had people onstage to close out the fest was a fitting moment. But I don’t think there will be anything (past or future Metal & Beer Fests) that could top what happened towards the end of Worm’s set. (If you know, you know! And if you don’t know, YouTube is your friend.) You're a pretty enthusiastic home brewer. What got you into that, and do you have aspirations to move beyond brewing in your kitchen someday?

When COVID hit, I was looking to do something creative. I couldn’t get together with my band, Blasphemous, or throw shows. And as a healthcare worker, I wanted something I could do to take my mind off of the stress of my job. Right before the world shut down, I went to a class at a local brewery, and they showed the process of a brew day. And I was hooked. Not long after that, I got a homebrew kit for Father’s Day. There has been a lot of trial and error, the biggest error being a nearly full bottling bucket crashing on my kitchen floor. In spite of that, my wife has been encouraging and involved. Eventually, I would love to go beyond the kitchen [and] incorporate my love of brewing and metal into a brewery/venue of my own.

Godflesh are on the cover of this issue. Decibel is in the minority believing that Pure, not Streetcleaner, is the band's high-water mark. What's your fave release from the Birmingham legends?

I had to take a deep listen to Pure and Streetcleaner based on this question. And it is kinda close, but I’m on Team Streetcleaner still. Wonder if anyone remembers them appearing in the movie Hideaway? I do plan on seeing them in September in Philly right before my birthday (if anyone wants an idea for an early birthday present). As a Philly sports fanatic, it’s been a year of close calls for our non-Flyers locals. Which of the major Philly teams will bring home the next championship for the city?

For those readers that may not know, Philly is the only city to have lost three major championships in the span of three months. The easy answer is to say the Eagles since they came the closest. The Sixers are about to start the second round of the playoffs, but just as Metal & Beer Fest happens every year in Philly, so does a Joel Embiid playoff injury. And getting through round two has been something they have the most trouble with. Maybe as this issue goes to press, we will have a different result and the Sixers will be on the brink of an NBA championship.

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

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NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month? Well, here are the records that we spun most while wishing Seth Binzer was from Pittsburgh so he could be Seth Yinzer.

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

This Month’s Mutha: Kay Maynor Mutha of Jacob Curwen of All Hell

Tell us a little about yourself.

I was born and raised in North Carolina, and moved to the Asheville area when I married Jacob’s father. I worked various jobs and am now retired after working for 30 years in the electric motor industry. I am a mother of five—four sons and one daughter, with Jacob being my youngest child. My parents were both musicians and played country and bluegrass music.

both enjoy some old country music like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Marty Robbins. I also like to listen to movie scores and soundtracks. We used to listen to the original Star Wars trilogy soundtracks on long car rides or vacation trips. If we ride somewhere together nowadays, we’ll sometimes still listen to those, and Jacob has also recently shown me albums from John Carpenter.

Your son has written some truly bleak and vivid lyrics. Did he express an interest in poetry or fiction when he was younger?

All Hell played the second-ever Decibel Metal & Beer Fest back in 2018. Do you have a favorite beer (or adult beverage)?

Growing up, Jacob always loved books, as I read to him a lot—he loved the Goosebumps books especially. His dad would also read him some of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and tell him old mountain folk tales from the area. Jacob learned to read and write at a very early age, and was very talented in reading, memorizing and writing poetry.

I don’t drink, so coffee is as adult as it gets for me. Jacob’s grandpa (on his dad’s side) was a moonshiner, though!

All Hell pull from a variety of extreme metal influences, from punk and thrash to death rock. Do you share any of Jacob’s musical tastes?

I’m not really into the more extreme stuff, but we do have some common ground. We 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

At the time of this writing, All Hell’s new EP, All Hail the Night, will come out in just under a month. Does Jacob share new music with you when it’s ready?

Jacob has always been a little secretive with his creations, whether it’s art or poetry or music, until he’s finished with them. But when he’s ready, he will show me things or sometimes play some parts for me on his guitar, and I always enjoy that. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Godflesh, Purge  Tsjuder, Helvegr  Persekutor, Snow Business  Escuela Grind, Memory Theater  Eyehategod, Take as Needed for Pain ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  The Black Delta Movement, Recovery Effects  Rudimentary Peni, Death Church  Paradise Lost, One Second  The Cure, Disintegration  Cult of Dom Keller, They Carried the Dead in a U.F.O. ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Godflesh, Purge  Incantation, Diabolical Conquest  Deathgrave, It’s Only Midnight  Bell Witch, Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate  Enforced, War Remains ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Frozen Soul, Glacial Domination  Undeath, It’s Time... to Rise from the Grave  Godflesh, Purge  The Black Dahlia Murder, Nocturnal  Calligram, Position | Momentum ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Heroin, Discography  Funeral Leech, Death Meditation  Bonegraft, Craniosynostosis  Ritual Mass, It Ever Turns  Death, Fate: The Best of Death

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Katerina Economou : escuela grind

 Jesus Piece, …So Unknown  Bbymutha, Muthaleficent 3  Bonginator, The Intergalactic Gorebong of Deathpot  The Acacia Strain, Step Into the Light / Failure Will Follow  Mac DeMarco, One Wayne G

PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2023

fter a 21-month pandemic-imposed Philadelphia, PA Metal & Beer Fest WHEN: April 14-15, 2023 pause, Team Decibel has somehow managed to stage five different Metal & Beer Fests in three different cities in just the past 19 months. The 2023 edition of our Philly flagship festival—our 10th overall—was the culmination of our breakneck pace. And break necks it fucking did. —ALBERT MUDRIAN WHERE: The Fillmore Philly,

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Shades of green  Reconfigured melodeath veterans The Black Dahlia Murder (opposite) and newly-minted doomed black metallers Worm each bring something new to Metal & Beer Fest

FRIDAY PHOBOPHILIC

Fargo death metal upstarts Phobophilic have

UNDEATH

worked hard to mark their debut dBMBF appearance. When Decibel saw the North Dakotans on the Undeath/200 Stab Wounds tour last year, they slayed the 250-cap room. Fast-forward a gazillion shows six months later, and Phobophilic’s Demilich/Timeghoul-flavored grotesquery filled the Fillmore’s state-of-the-art 2,500-cap space with elegant brutality and proficient lethality. Tracks off of their crushingly good full-length Enveloping Absurdity felt larger than life and grosser than Chris Reifert’s bathroom. “Cathedrals of Blood,” “Diminished to Unbeing,” “Nauseating Despair” and “The Illusion of Self” set high-as-fuck standards for Day 1. —CHRIS DICK

The Decibel-crowned kings of 2022 masterfully displayed to the Fillmore audience a golden rule when it comes to memorable death metal: It should be fun. “I want this to be death metal Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” beckoned vocalist Alexander Jones, “and the secret word is ‘push pit.’” With fan favorites like “Rise From the Grave,” “Necrobionics” and “Lesions of a Different Kind” already incredible on their own, Undeath’s stage presence and charisma is what truly moved the crowd and has them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the OSDM greats. This is their time to rise; don’t be surprised to see that they’ve clawed their way to the top. —MICHAEL WOHLBERG

WORM

FROZEN SOUL

their second-ever show at dBMBF. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. Frontman/progenitor Phantomslaughter and his trusty axeman Wroth Septentrion (also of Chthe’ilist fame) were unafraid to risk all in front of a curious, more than halffull (at rush hour) Philly assemblage. With a full band and a stage set for ritual sacrifice (with sheepishly mocked cunnilingus, natch) in tow, Worm transcended heavily into the proverbial peripheral on “Murk Above the Dark Moor,” “Bluenothing” and “Shadowside Kingdom.” If Worm are this pro two shows in, imagine what they’ll be like after a national tour. —CHRIS DICK

the slow build-up for opener “Encased in Ice,” Texas’ hottest new export whipped the crowd into a fever pitch and made damn sure they kept up the pace. Vocalist Chad Green’s demands for more circle pits were happily obliged and led to a 40-minute frenzy that took up the majority of the Fillmore’s massive floor. With new album Glacial Domination emerging over the horizon, fans were treated to three new songs, including personal favorite “Death and Glory.” Frozen Soul are most certainly not to be missed; just make sure to limber up beforehand.

Florida-Canada black-doom outfit Worm had

PHOTOS BY HILL ARIE JA SON

We could all use a little more cardio. After

—MICHAEL WOHLBERG D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 1 1

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2023

Gor-grind  A reactivated Gorguts (l) pack the Fillmore with an unforgettable Friday set while Escuela Grind kick things off bright and early on Saturday afternoon

Hell was on tour at the time, but the members

reconfigured as Mizmor for this night, and damned if it wasn’t the best Mizmor show I’ve seen. A short 30-minute set made the band go for the throat, suffusing the room with the heaviest tones of the fest. Part of what makes Mizmor special is a kind of delicate patience, and while this set had that, the rocking parts had a monolithic quality that felt fresh and confident. They came, they doomed, they conquered, they resumed touring with their other band. It wasn’t much too vulgar a display of power. —COSMO LEE

GORGUTS

Festivals are places to win fans, not play to your

base, and the savvy motherfuckers in Gorguts struck all the right chords in that regard. The first half-hour of their set leaned hard on the crunchy, craven sounds of their 1991 debut, Considered Dead. The slavering crowd ate it up and begged for more. When Luc Lemay had all of us drunkards eating out of his iron fist, he upshifted into songs from his band’s “second first album,” 1998’s brain-boggling Obscura. The flame had been lit, our blood was already up, and our celebration of death metal history got more dissonant and weird, but no less fervent. —DANIEL LAKE 1 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER

After a tribute show for dearly departed Trevor Strnad and two warm-up gigs, Brian Eschbach’s fourth show as BDM’s vocalist was headlining for thousands of people at this fest. No pressure! He did great, occasionally channeling Strnad’s shriek, but otherwise getting his own groove on with warmth and humor. He was buoyed by a supremely professional band that slung around fleet-fingered leads, nitro-fueled drums and agile bass like it ain’t a thang. It was a special night, but also comforting in a way. For 70 minutes, BDM kicked ass as always, and all was right with the world. —COSMO LEE

SATURDAY ESCUELA GRIND

Northeast outfit Escuela Grind were tasked with

giving the crowd something a little different to start off Saturday, following the prior day’s death metal-centric build. The quartet’s blend of grind and metallic hardcore was a party pleaser, with drummer Jesse Fuentes leading the crowd in surprisingly enthusiastic call-andresponse chants of “Pee-pee” and “Poo-poo.” EG also earned the award for busiest merch table of

the weekend, with a sizable line remaining for a solid two hours after their set. If you were too hung over to catch them, “All Is Forgiven” (but drink some water and pace yourself next time, amateur!) —EMILY BELLINO

FUMING MOUTH

It had been nearly four years since Fuming Mouth last touched ground in Philadelphia due to guitarist and vocalist Mark Whelan’s battle with leukemia. Even considering the technical difficulties that truncated their set, Fuming Mouth made a statement: They’re here to stay and they haven’t skipped a fucking beat. Their hardcore-tinged death metal matched the Friday night mood while setting the tone for Drowningman, All Out War and Suicidal Tendencies later that night, and Whelan’s pre-breakdown shoutouts to collaborator Bone Up Brewing—and everyone drinking the collab beer—reminded us of the reason for the season. Welcome back, Fuming Mouth. —EMILY BELLINO

DROWNINGMAN

Vermont metallic hardcore anti-heroes Drowningman delivered a characteristically off-thehook performance, showcasing the polemic bookends of their vitriolic catalog, including

GORGUTS PHOTO BY HILLARIE JASON • ESCUELA GRIND PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

MIZMOR

POSSESSED Our valiant effort to recap over 50 different pours from 16 breweries at

METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY ecibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest has come a long way

since 2017’s freewheeling hops-plosion when breweries were pouring from every nook and cranny in the venue, most brought enough beer to be throwing it at revelers at the end of the night, and no liquid under that roof seemed to dip below an ABV of 8%. All these years later, there are still plenty of styles to try, but since none of the suppliers want to cart their unused wares back home, everyone brings a more modest amount, and adventurous drinkers need to start early and stay busy if they want to sample all the varieties available before the stock runs dry. Also, more of the beverages slide in under 5% ABV, which can mean a less extreme flavor profile, but also a less headache-inducing ordeal overall. This year, I took that as a personal challenge to flog my internal organs with as much as they could take. I won. I lost. Here’s the rundown: I started at the Wake Brewing table, whose Southern Discomfort pilsner collaboration with Eyehategod provided a bright, tasty opener to the weekend. A late evening return meant the only offering still available was their Frost Hammer double dry-hopped hazy IPA, which was fine by me—it’s heartily hoppy, but not face-punchingly so. I had to wait until Saturday to check out Strange Creature, their Escuela Grind-backed hefeweizen, whose pleasant floral flavor is subtle, but clear and full of character. Phobophilic’s doomy death corruption sent me straight to 3 Floyds for a hit of Friday’s Hellaboozie, a variation of their celebrated Dark Lord imperial stout. It delivers an over-the-top fruity malt punch that just deepens after swallowing; every sip is a treasured experience. The second Dark Lord variety, French Vanilla Militia, is a bit sweeter, more bitter on the back end; wonderful, but not quite as commanding as its sister beer. The Phantom Blade pilsner is a smooth customer at any temperature, which I discovered when I found a can of it that had been sitting under the Decibel merch table all evening and drank it up because nobody told me I couldn’t (and James Lewis actively encouraged me to, anyway). The Berried in Ice kettle sour is an inviting, unpretentious version of that style, and the Zombie Ice double pale ale hit the spot like any hop-centric undead reference should.

Virginia powerhouse Adroit Theory brought the thunder with their 10% hazy triple IPA called I Am Death, Destroyer of Worlds, and their even huger imperial Stout Darker Than Death or Night, a super chocolatey and delicious brew that avoids being cloying while managing its own sweet, bitter beauty. TRVE Brewing served a steady and demanding base of fans, so while I got around to their rye saison called Beyond the Fields We Know (gripping flavor, almost caustic on the tongue) and their Ostara 2023 mixed culture sour (a lighter touch; a kinder, gentler sour), I somehow missed the Bloodaxe Nordic farmhouse ale that would certainly have improved Saturday’s fortunes. Broken Goblet reprised their award-nominated Candlemass Doom Lager, a dark, malty affair that isn’t too complex to enjoy multiple small cups in a row. They also featured the smooth Clawing at the Casket Lid Irish stout, as well as the surprising bouquet of flavors in Under Her Spell, which boasts an 8.5% ABV that most saisons can only daydream about. Animated’s Drowningman collaboration, the It Will End in Hops IPA, bursts with a refreshing hop aroma just right for a sessionable beer. KCBC’s ZOMBIES fruited sour is a tame, relaxed ‘tweener beer, great for a break between more brutal libations. Magnanimous Brewing’s Dark Messenger porter strikes a perfect balance, its rich malt enhanced by a vanilla infusion. My first trip to the WarPigs table ended in spilling a couple ounces of their Pareidolia kettle sour down the front of my pants, which was sad because it’s a great drink that benefits from being passionfruitforward without losing any beeriness. Their Blinding Lightshow IPA is likewise juicy and exciting. Bone Up’s Extra Naked table beer lacks nothing for its simplicity, and the Caustic Abomination ale blooms with the kind of quirky funk that separates casual drinkers from the serious imbibers. But in the end, it was Brimming Horn Meadery, with their slightly boozy, fruit-centered Goat’s Blood and the truly impressive, highly complex Wolves of the Ironwood that stole my heart… and my last gasping liver cells. And after all that, I know I still missed a ton of great beer that served to inebriate other concertgoers. There’s always next year, and art director Mike Wohlberg assures me I won’t remember much of that one, either. D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 1 3

PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

by Daniel Lake

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2023

three cuts from their newly reissued debut Busy Signal at the Suicide Hotline (angular opener “Condoning the Use of Inhalants” and vicious closer “Clothesline” being the standouts). After assisting the uninitiated in “connecting with their roots” (including their 1998 split with the Dillinger Escape Plan), Simon Brody and crew ripped through both sides of 2022’s Later Day Saints (cas)single, notably their first release in a hot 17 years—potentially why the 20-somethings in the pit appeared so bewildered attempting to process this newly refurbished rock ‘n’ roll killing machine. —AARON SALSBURY

ALL OUT WAR

Earlier that week, I saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The experience was profound—brushstrokes up close have a presence and physicality not possible with photos of paintings. Seeing All Out War felt likewise. Their new black metal-tinged album, Celestial Rot: very good. Their live show: hot damn. On a punk-heavy day that kept the pit busy, All Out War took the “pit kings” crown. While the spirit of NYHC loomed large, it was gloriously surreal to hear church-burning riffs and see a floor full of kids furiously picking up change. —COSMO LEE 1 4 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

INCANTATION

When death metal legends Incantation rolled

out “Shadows of the Ancient Empire” at dBMBF in 2018, it was merely a segue to Repulsion. So, Diabolical Conquest, on paper, didn’t exactly turn Philadelphia’s cantankerous nuns into concupiscent fun this time. Sandwiched between All Out War and Eyehategod, the ever-affable John McEntee, midway through his 34th year as imperator deluxe, took Incantation from a lovable, always-necessary evil to a place I’ve personally never seen. McEntee, guitarist Luke Shively, bassist Chuck Sherwood and fill-in drummer Ruston Grosse (Master) were utterly peerless. The 16 fucking minutes of epic “Unto Infinite Twilight / Majesty of Infernal Damnation” > all of Onward to Golgotha. Fight me. I dare you. —CHRIS DICK

EYEHATEGOD

Historically Eyehategod performances were

remembered for chaos, blood, broken bottles and Mike IX Williams’ antics. This performance will be remembered for something far different: unrivaled musicality. A healthy Williams and EHG, performing with former guitarist Brian Patton, played dB HOF inductee Take as Needed for Pain in its entirety for the festival’s

penultimate set. From the glorious opening feedback in “Blank” to the closing moments, the audience was bathed in god-level Iommi league tone and ferocious Southern blues groove. It might have been the best set of the weekend. The songs on Take as Needed are timeless, and anyone lucky to hear all of them live will carry them in their bones and lean tissue. Burn her! —JUSTIN M. NORTON

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

Playing a festival after two days of heavy bands and strong beers is a tough task for anyone, but Suicidal Tendencies were up to the task. Performing the entirety of their timeless 1983 debut and a selection of classics like “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow,” Muir and his 2023 ST lineup injected a final dose of adrenaline into the Fillmore. Opening with a hellacious version of “You Can’t Bring Me Down” (driven by the insane performance of drummer Brandon Pertzborn, playing his last gig with ST), the crossover legends worked the crowd into a frenzy and then (not so subliminally) invited half of them and your dead mommy onstage to close the night. Mudrian might have shit his pants a little, but it’s good to see ST still on brand all these years and Pepsis later. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY • EYEHATEGOD PHOTO BY HILLARIE JASON

Took a picture ‘cause I thought it was neat  Suicidal Tendencies (l) and Eyehategod give our 2023 festivities a memorable send-off

NEY ISEM

T BY COUR

Rude Awakenings woke up yesterday with a series of group texts from work that began with, “There’s a naked man in our parking lot.” Which, thanks to years of this shit, didn’t really faze me. I’d managed a liquor store in one of the more entertaining parts of town, and still have a screencap of security footage of a woman pressing ham against the back door and pressure-washing it with a stream of liquid shit; it wasn’t the worst paint job I’ve seen, but definitely bottom five. Our location, however, is in the nicer part of the city; the staff are mostly middle-aged women. This man was wearing a baby doll outfit before he disrobed and, by text account, began to finger his asshole at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Fortunately, it wasn’t my car to crash, so I let them all work out calling the police, who arrived fashionably late after the gentleman had collapsed into a scratching heap in the grass. Then I got back to the task of making coffee and trying to figure out if I had anything interesting to talk at you about this month. We’re in the foreplay stage of summer, just getting ready for the tip-in, which generally would make me nostalgic for years past. But I guess I’m having performance anxiety (I’m going to beat this metaphor into the ground) because I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. I’m not sure if this is a new emotional defense against growing older or if the nostalgia part of my brain got choked of oxygen and died when I started smoking again. Either way, I haven’t picked out my old death metal records and started my seasonal listening yet. It’s strange to think about your experiences and what you are or are not nostalgic for, since it’s completely personal and entirely subjective. 1 6 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

Think about the time we’re in now—will this be nostalgia for someone down the road? Will people be wistful about how they saw a patch of a band that scared them at a fest, so they tried to have everyone who attended fired from their jobs and/or executed? Do those who were executed (but not fired) still have to show up to work? Are the bands who some (me) find derivative and boring making future classics, and I’m just too out of step to recognize it? I’m now the age my mother was when I was really immersing myself into the underground as a lad. That should put it into perspective, I suppose. I hadn’t ever thought that until typing it out, but it makes some semblance of sense, especially when I’m reading stories about Trey Azagthoth collapsing at a recent show and seeing he’s fucking 58, while on the flipside there’s bands getting accolades for records that I think are fucking boring who weren’t even born when I recorded my first record. Do I just not “get it” because I’m old enough to be many of your fathers? I struggled with the syntax there, but you get the idea. I should have tried to shoehorn in a “daddy” joke—noted for next time. So, I guess the lesson this month is to try to keep things in perspective. Every time is not your time, but you do own it. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t, but what I mean is that certain ages own their time, like my age owned the direction of the ’90s. I’ve aged out of that ownership, but I do own the direction of my personal time, my own life. And, like texts about a strange dancing man’s prick, I chose to ignore the bands/music I think are boring, trite or fucking trash because it’s another generation’s responsibility to step up and fight those fights. At least today.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em? Craft Beer Does the Unthinkable and Mimics Macro Beer

its marketing copy for

Arrogant Bastard Ale, Stone Brewing calls Big Beer the “height of tyranny,” “pandering to the lowest common denominator.” But the heyday of Stone and craft beer at large—with founders like Stone’s Greg Koch William Wallace-ing to crowds of drinkers ready to embrace their inner Davids versus the Goliaths of Anheuser-Busch and Coors—seems to be behind us. The galvanizing power of independent-is-best might continue to effectively speak to some remaining die-hard enthusiasts, but in any real industry-shaping way, it’s lost out to fickle consumers onto new trends, marketplace saturation and an economic climate forcing even craft-dedicated consumers to second-guess spending. It would have been impossible to imagine during the early aughts’ IBU Wars (or frankly even pre-White Claw), but a growing number of craft breweries have started mimicking what the industry formed as a response to macro beer. Light lagers. Six-packs of 12-ounce cans, even 12- and 15-packs. Whether it’s light lager or pilsner or kölsch, can design inspired by regional lagers of decades past like Genesee

 Until the lite takes us Nite Lite by Night Shift Brewing proves that light beer doesn’t have to be light on flavor

Cream Ale, Hamm’s Beer, and Schlitz. There’s Lamp Lager from Lamplighter Brewing Co. in Cambridge, MA; Pils from Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minneapolis; Classic City Lager from Creature Comforts Brewing Co. in Athens, GA; BrickStone Lager from BrickStone Brewery in Bourbonnais, IL. And in Covington, KY, Braxton Brewing Company even spun its Garage Beer lager into its own brand. An overall focus on lighter styles meets an ever-expanding need from drinkers. Tastes are evolving, IPA fatigue is real, and craft connoisseurs are aging, seeking ways to interact with beer that are easier-drinking and don’t derail their days. Craft beer has fostered a swell of lager love for a few years now, and some breweries argue that this doesn’t have to exclude light lager. Macro beer gave it a bad rap with its watery offerings, but when an indie brewery applies its quality ingredients and attention to detail? Debuted in 2018, Nite Lite Lager from Night Shift Brewing in Massachusetts is an early trendsetter and success story. “We saw light beer as an overlooked ‘white space’ in the craft brewing industry,” says co-founder Michael Oxton. “Pretty much nobody other than the macros were touching it, yet it’s an enormous category (roughly 25 percent of all beer sold at retail in Massachusetts is light beer).” Nite Lite’s recipe “prioritizes big flavors,” using real corn and German hops with no preservatives, corn syrup or artificial flavors. Then there’s nostalgia. “Everything comes back around again, right?” says Shana Solarte, a Chicago-based Advanced Cicerone and technical writer for Omega Yeast. “Maybe this is

an attempt to appeal to an aging demographic, or maybe an appeal to society’s current obsession with nostalgia,” she reasons, citing this year’s Super Mario Bros. and Barbie movies. Perhaps your first beer, before you got into craft, was one of these regional lagers. Or you have fond memories of your parents favoring one. Or maybe you’re after the cool factor of that vintage vibe, à la PBR’s rise with hipsters in the early aughts. Easy-drinking styles and throwback branding is all well and good, as fun of a move as it is smart for craft breweries. But what about when a small-to-regional brewery decides to go full macro beer, packaging their light lager or pilsner in a 12- or 15-pack of 12-ounce cans? Because of the competition and declining interest in craft beer right now, breweries are trying to lure customers with a value buy. But can that possibly translate to actual profits for the average craft brewery? As Solarte notes, “None of these craft brewers will ever be able to compete with the big brewers on the shelf, price-wise.” A 12-pack of retro-branded lager can successfully attract a craft consumer, but in terms of converting a macro beer buyer, they’ll be looking for that macro beer price. They’ll wonder why they’d pay double for the same style of beer, in the same packaging. At the end of the day, craft beer might be mimicking Big Beer, but it still takes that devotion to and understanding of craft to actually appreciate this trend. So, don’t be mad at craft breweries for selling out. Embrace the crushable lagers and the nostalgia, and rest assured that, for better or worse, craft beers will remain craft domain.

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BONGZILLA

BONGZILLA Infamous sludge stoners know that just a dab’ll do ya

THE

third time—maybe even the fourth—that this culture vulture interviewed Bill Cosby, the subject of sweet leaf came up. After admonishing yours truly for partaking, the now infamous Philadelphian went into a doctoral-level lecture about the effects of THC on people. To which yours truly blithely wondered why he knew so much about physiology. ¶ Bongzilla’s Mike “Muleboy” Makela employs his scholarship on the subject purely for good. “Oh man,” emails the bassist witchcryer. “[Weed] is a gift from Mother Earth for sure. Humans actually have THC receptors. I am very abusive when it comes to drugs. I have trouble with almost all the bigs. Marijuana is the only one you can abuse with little or no repercussions.” ¶ Equally guiltless, the Wisconsin sludge trio’s sixth full-length since 1996 (and only second since reforming nearly a decade ago), Dab City, taps those receptors hard and fast. In the name of science, your interlocutor once dabbed at Maryland Deathfest 1 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

and immediately after had to lie down—back at the hotel, fully dressed, shoes on, covers up to the chin, calling the wife to talk me down. Seven joints in just under an hour, Dab City invites the same. “Dabs: as my girlfriend calls it, ‘a short to super high,’” offers the frontman. “I have previously been addicted to opiates. Concentrates make marijuana a hard drug. Forever I have smoked a ton. Now I dab and smoke. Less inhaling to get where I want to go. “Great dab story [btw],” he compliments me. “Like lots of things, it’s not for everyone.” Dab City’s opening 12-minute title track comes on all toms and throb and tone: crude, bulbous, Cretaceous. Makela’s scalding throat expungement recedes quickly as Bongzilla set off across the desert of their own time warp, cymbals beating like the sun courtesy of Mike “Magma”

Henry as guitar from Jeff “Spanky” Schultz rises in refracted heat. Blackened Sabbath. Amp abuse spreading blanket doom, Dab City tributes its inhalers’ college town of origin, where I once moved a postdoctoral ex into a quaint, Mary Tyler Moore-esque rental with a spire. “What a wonderful picture of the old Madison you’ve painted,” writes Makela. “Sadly, like much of the U.S., tech money flipped this once hippie haven on its old freaky side. I am older as well, but from what I can tell, the freaks are almost all gone, and rent and living expenses are flying sky high. Almost all the clubs are owned by Clear Channel. The right is winning! “Dab City is an ode to the Madison I moved to: great weed everywhere, way before most places. The alcohol culture rules now! I would miss the old Madison, if not for dabs!” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

THULCANDRA

Germans cross unhallowed black horizons avoiding infinite obscurity

ickoff tracks “As I Walk Through the Gateway” and “Hail the Abyss” offer beyond-the-horizon glimpses into Steffen Kummerer’s all-feel tenor on Thulcandra’s fifth full-length, Hail the Abyss. Immediately, ice-blue worlds of horse-riding reapers, ominous snow-capped mountains and baleful skies rush into view. This has been and still is Thulcandra at heart. Effectively Kummerer’s alter ego from the overtly techminded Obscura, the group he formed out of fondness for Nordic black/death shows no signs of slowing as it slices into the hardened veins of two decades. ¶ “When we started the band in early 2003, barely anyone listened to this particular style of music,” says the Bavarian. “We grew up with this music. With Thulcandra, we decided to write our own story, while never neglecting where we came from. The roots are obvious, the influences are present at all times and [yet] we still follow our own path. We are more experienced [now], but our intention to write hasn’t changed over the last 20 years. We love what we do, and our following grows constantly.” ¶ But the difference, which began on mid-pandemic rager A Dying Wish, is an enthusiastic lean into classic metal, where twin guitars, galloping rhythms and

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storytelling expanse articulate ably with Thulcandra’s history of dissonance, aggression and enmity. While the two instrumentals— “At Night” and “In Darkness We Descend”—ascend from John Zwetsloot-style depths, “As I Walk Through the Gateway,” “On the Wings of Cosmic Fire” and “Acheronian Cult” harness the vestiges of NWOBHM and its stateside offspring (think: Metal Church and Helstar). Hail the Abyss is still very much blackened death metal, however. “This album—and all records since the beginning—is rooted on the collective effort of each band member,” offers Kummerer. “We recorded songs with a slightly different vibe. [There’s] more classic heavy metal, and even more variations in tempo, aggression and dynamics. The palette between uptempo and doom has been widened once more, and we had the chance to improve [it all] with choirs and the use of a small string ensemble.” Certainly, Hail the Abyss is the brainchild of Kummerer, but it’s by

no means solely of his formulation. The songwriting originated on both sides of the fretboard, with guitarist Mariano Delastik, also of Haradwaith fame, contributing significantly to the album’s corpus. The band—featuring long-timer Alessandro “Erebor” Delastik on drums and newcomer Carsten Schorn on bass—then crafted and nailed everything into place. There’s no doubt Kummerer has the power with Obscura; but in Thulcandra, equity reigns supreme. “There are no regrets,” he stresses. “I am proud of what we have achieved since the very first demo we worked on as a collective. With the band, we never forced anything. We got the chance to record and release five albums, with more to come in the future. Keeping the vibe and attitude, while always being true to ourselves without compromise, has been the wisest decision in our career. This might also be a reason why Thulcandra [have] lasted so long.” —CHRIS DICK

DEATHGRAVE

Bay Area bruisers speak the foundational language of sick riffs

magine busytown. in the world created by children’s author Richard Scarry, everything is orderly, everyone has a job and the world runs smoothly. Now imagine that world with a gaping cosmic hole and a bulbous insectivore head peeking in from an alternate universe, and you have a sense of what’s depicted in the second Deathgrave album, It’s Only Midnight. It might be better off titled Busytown Goes to Hell. ¶ It’s Only Midnight—advertised as deathgrind, but better thought of as genreless brutality—weaves together stories from a city that looks a lot like West Oakland experiencing a cosmic bleedthrough. Even the album art is part of the concept: Look closely at the cover and see places mentioned in the songs. ¶ “The whole concept is this neighborhood experiencing an interdimensional tear,” says guitarist Greg Wilkinson. “This horrific dimension is ripping into the neighborhood and the songs talk about all the weird, quirky things that happen.” ¶ Like Deathgrave’s music is a hodgepodge of brutality, vocalist Andre Cornejo’s lyrics

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combine Zappa satire, dystopian fiction and novelist Sherwood Anderson. “We are not a political band, but observations of our lives creep in there,” Wilkinson says. “Science fiction movies and comic books build alternate realities, and I think that’s what Deathgrave wants to do. We are creating this alternate world, and all the songs connect to that alternate world parallel to ours. That said, if someone wants to talk about politics, we have something to say.” The Bay Area is now one of the global hubs of the old-school death metal resurgence. Wilkinson is a pillar of that world as a member of Autopsy and a producer for many OSDM albums at Earhammer Studios, but Deathgrave is where he’s allowed to get weird. “We’ve come to terms with the fact that we will never fit in the mold,” he says, laughing. “We are too fucked up and weird. We’ve had moments where

certain members suggested making things more palatable. But none of us were ever convinced this was a good idea. With this record, we took any notion of acceptance and threw it out the window. None of us have even played in popular or accessible bands anyway.” One upside to Deathgrave’s shapeshifting is they have no problem fitting on any bill, including Ludicra’s one-night stand in San Francisco last fall. Wilkinson hopes that helps them reach more listeners with curious ears. “Ludicra was a band that transcended black metal,” he notes. “People who liked doom and sludge and death metal liked them. Deathgrave is looking for the same trajectory where fans of many kinds of metal enjoy us. “Sick riffs are the foundation we take and build from,” he concludes. “From there it’s all about what we can get away with and still play live.” —JUSTIN M. NORTON

PHOTO BY MYRON FUNG

DEATHGRAVE

NECROFIER

USBM disciples bronze a callous sound in heavy metal classicism

the time grandstanding fourth track “Forbidden Light of the Black Moon” announces itself in anthemic fury on Necrofier’s second LP, it feels as though some malodorous entity has dragged Immortal out of Blashyrkh by their bullet belts and cast them face-first into the Chihuahuan Desert. Such is the balance between triumphal heavy metal and black metal’s thorny stylings on display. ¶ “Black and heavy metal are my two favorite types of metal,” confirms Christian “Bakka” Larson, the Texas band’s vocalist/guitarist. “When Dobber [Beverly, drums] and I created Necrofier, we wanted to involve those elements into everything; pay tribute to both styles from the past. On this record, I think we really came full circle, and we have paid tribute and developed a style of our own.” ¶ With Beverly in the ranks—a veteran songwriter and a driving force behind Oceans of Slumber—it would be folly for Necrofier not to also lean further into heavy metal traditionalism for their odes to the Horned One. On Burning Shadows in the Southern Night, the new tracks sound more multi-dimensional

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than on 2021’s Prophecies of Eternal Darkness, with greater emphasis placed on hook-writing and crafting cohesive, impactful arrangements. Capturing the power of “Total Southern Darkness,” the tribute to Selim Lemouchi of the Devil’s Blood in “Destroying Angels,” and the rest of these ritualistic fire-dancing hymns fell on Joel Hamilton—an esteemed producer, but not one particularly familiar to black metal kvltists. Hamilton worked on the last Oceans of Slumber album, and to his credit, he has done an equally stellar job with Necrofier; their new record not only retains the edge essential for black metal, but also incorporates plenty of tonal clarity and sonic punch. “Thank you so much—that’s exactly what we were shooting for,” says Larson. “I’m floored by how good the record sounds. Joel also has an aura to him that breeds creativity in others. Of course, at

first, there was a second where I thought, ‘Is this record going to sound too good [for black metal]?’ Is it possible to make a BM record that doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a dumpster from 200 feet away and still have the rawness it needs? But this was never an issue with Joel. It’s not an easy task capturing lightning in a bottle, but he did it.” Necrofier have little in common with their more atmospheric peers across USBM—the band shares closer stylistic kinship with the likes of Goatwhore or Black Anvil. And while Larson acknowledges that the future is not written, he does believe Necrofier will continue down a darker (left hand) path while still shining heavy metal elements like cherished armory. He concludes with this defiant statement of warning: “The fire in the band is rising and we will not be put out.” —DEAN BROWN

PHOTO BY VIOLETA ALVAREZ

NECROFIER

BLOOD CEREMONY

pon first listen of Blood Ceremony’s long-awaited fifth album The Old Ways Remain, the Canadian pagan rockers check all the boxes that have helped endear them to many: gloomy Sabbath riffs, 1970s English folk rock, vintage prog, jazz fusion and enough tasty flute solos to make Ian Anderson viridescent with jealousy. The deeper you go, however, the more strangely upbeat the record feels amidst the Old World mystery, as though Shocking Blue decided to sit in with Widow. It sounds downright convivial. ¶ “I’m glad that comes across,” says guitarist Sean Kennedy. “During the pandemic, I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and the band stayed at my place for a week while we recorded at a downtown studio. Friends visited and contributed to the album, such as Laura Bates of Völur, who played fiddle on ‘The Bonfires at Belloc Coombe’ and ‘Mossy Wood.’ The great thing was that we were able to finish up on weekends, so we were afforded a bit more time to realize all our ideas.” ¶ “We also were able to bring in Joseph Shabason on saxophone,

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Michael Eckert on pedal steel, and longtime friend Paul Keyahas helped co-produce the album,” adds singer/flautist Alia O’Brien. “The collaborative energy was palpable, and made the studio feel so lively. It was a major relief, as well, to be able to lay down all the backing vocals over the course of a few weekends. Because of this, we could bring some more complicated vocal arrangements to life—without my vocal cords giving out!” Highlighted by the Jess Francoinspired “Eugenie” (“a Krautrockinspired sleazefest,” according to Kennedy) and the hazily beautiful “Hecate,” The Old Ways Remain shows a new side of Blood Ceremony without betraying their trademark sound. “Earlier in the band’s days, I was pretty deep into extravagant progressive rock from all over the map,” O’Brien muses, “but in recent years

I’ve come to appreciate the magic of a concise, well-crafted pop song with just enough left-field chord changes or timbral flourishes to keep the ear engaged. This has rubbed off on some of my writing, no doubt. We also felt comfortable experimenting with some different sounds this time around—sax, pedal steel, congas, even more e-piano than on albums previous—that perhaps give an impression of lightness.” “I think the newer songs are more focused than what we were doing on our first two albums,” Kennedy adds. “It’s been a natural progression for us. Now that we’re on our fifth album, I’m much more comfortable cutting out parts that don’t necessarily need to be there. ‘Murder your darlings’ is great writing advice from the author ‘Q,’ and I hope we’re getting better at it.” —ADRIEN BEGRAND

PHOTO BY MATTHEW MANNA

Psych doom rockers expand their already colorful palette

VHS

Old-school metal and movie nerds reel out the riffage

anadian power trio VHS (which surreptitiously stands for Violent Homicidal Slasher) have done albums about vampires, slasher movies and their synth-based soundtracks, sci-fi horror and more. Fortunately, for all their cinematic obsessions, they haven’t taken their sights off the most important thing, and the aptly titled new album, Quest for the Mighty Riff, is full of, well, mighty riffs and equally mighty punked-up death/thrash ragers, focusing on the already very metal ‘80s sword-and-sorcery world. ¶ “When I started to write the album, I was noticing a lot of bands using the same old horror movie samples and the same tired imagery,” recalls vocalist/guitarist Mike Hochins. “I wanted to sidestep horror for one release and recharge my batteries with something just as cheesy and just as fun. We don’t have any rules for our music and just do whatever we want. We like to watch cheesy movies, write fun songs and have a blast while doing it!” ¶ Simple, isn’t it? Hochins’ enthusiasm really is palpable, 2 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

and any questions you might have about the gimmicky nature of the band feel meaningless after just a few minutes of conversation. “The riff is always king with us, so the music is always first and the themes second,” he emphasizes. “We are a rough and loose kind of band, but we do take the music side of things very seriously.” It’s actually interesting how, for a band with such a simple (or indeed “rough and loose”) approach to songwriting, VHS actually stretch across a few genres. This is far from being dumb, easily pigeonholed music. “I’ve always looked at VHS as kind of a love letter to my teenage years,” Hochins explains. “I tend to call us a death metal band as well, but in reality I feel we are more of a punk-influenced hard rock band with death metal vocals. We definitely owe just as much to

KISS as we do to Cannibal Corpse. VHS is all about paying homage to what we love, both music- and movie-wise.” It’s an homage that these sorcerers and barbarians will continue, with lots of new ideas already taking place. “We already have the next album written and mostly recorded, actually,” Hochins reveals. “I don’t really want to give any spoilers just yet. Maybe it’s about Satan-themed movies, or maybe it isn’t? I don’t think we will run out of subjects any time soon. We’ve kind of proved that we don’t have to stick to only horror, so the pool of movies to choose from is pretty limitless! If it’s corny, has awesome box art and has something interesting or fun going on story-wise, I’m sure we would be able to make a song out of it!” And that’s really all that matters. —JOSÉ CARLOS SANTOS

PHOTO BY LEE-ANN HOCHINS

VHS

SATURNUS

Doom-death Danes’ decade of darkness ends with newfound stability

leven years have passed since Danish doom metal band Saturnus’ last album, but The Storm Within closes out what the band considers to be a necessary stopgap. Even so, they consider this recording absence to have passed quickly. ¶ “The story continues with those big gaps,” says vocalist Thomas A.G. Jensen. “Since the last release, we toured a lot and promoted that album. In that period, we could not find the strength to compose anything, as we were interfered with all the time with shows and mini tours. When the writing process got serious, we gave space to our members who have children and also those who pursued education, but there was also a lack of inspiration [and] also a lack of will from some members who are not in the band anymore. If we’re not in the same place individually, it’s hard to compose. Here we are, 11 years later. I can’t believe it. It is a new beginning, looking back at old demons and trouble we had with past members.”

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“It was nice to have [Novembers Doom vocalist] Paul Kuhr on the ballad,” he continues, and as a Chicagoan myself, hearing a familiar voice certainly added to my enjoyment of The Storm Within. “It had been in the works for years, after I was featured on an album of Novembers Doom’s.” Of course, Saturnus live in the shadow of their Euphonious Records era, especially their first two albums, 1997’s Paradise Belongs to You and 2000’s Martyre. Though fans were recently treated to a Prophecy Productions reissue of 2006’s Veronika Decides to Die, it looks like a Euphonious-era box set is just a pipe dream for now. “A vinyl box of the first three albums would be a dream,” Jensen pines. “Paradise Belongs to You is my first-born baby, and to have

your own music on vinyl is such an amazing feeling. You never know—we cannot predict the future—but I hope for the best! We are waiting patiently.” Though there are rights issues with their older material, Saturnus continue to look forward with what could be one of their greatest albums to date. “With the new lineup, I think we’ve finally found a stable one,” Jensen says quite happily. “Even though two of the members are in Spain and in England, so we don’t rehearse that much. But when we do meet up, it’s such a great atmosphere. Everything mixed together is what makes it what it is. There’s never talk of making references; we just came up with things out of the blue and naturally.” —JON ROSENTHAL

PHOTO BY THOMAS LESSER

SATURNUS

PUPIL SLICER Mathcore/blackgaze youngsters are already in bloom on sophomore LP

all happened relatively quickly for U.K.-based mathcore unit Pupil Slicer, whose ascension came off the back of their first release, Mirrors. As frontperson Kate Davies puts it, the trio was just making a record for themselves and their friends, except that record caught the ear of a much larger audience. Pupil Slicer went from opening local shows in London to touring with Rolo Tomassi and playing Download Festival in almost no time, but the band is rising to the occasion. If anything, the success of their debut allowed Pupil Slicer to comfortably take larger steps on the follow-up, Blossom. ¶ “It was more freedom to have confidence,” Davies reflects. “People seemed to like basically everything we did on the first album and it left room for us to experiment more on this one, knowing people basically liked everything we did,

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so we might as well just keep doing whatever we think sounds cool and hope people will still like it.” At its core, the narrative behind Blossom is a dystopian combination of science fiction and horror that blends lived experiences with an overarching story penned by Davies, inspired by books, movies and video games, including Final Fantasy XIV and The Outer Worlds. It’s another shift from Mirrors, but one that Davies (who uses them/they pronouns) explains as an extension of themselves. “It was just more fun to write in a fantastical fashion. It’s still analogous and based around personal experiences being translated into a story. I thought it would be way too big of a task, but one of my favorite albums is The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, and that’s a fantastic concept album.”

Davies originally believed that a concept album would be too large an undertaking, but it became more manageable as the story developed a beginning, middle and end, which allowed the musicians to fill in the gaps. To match the more elaborate writing process—a much more collaborative affair as the band grows out of its nascent stages—they spent a month in the studio with producer Lewis Johns (Ithaca, Employed to Serve, Rolo Tomassi), who encouraged them to experiment with clean singing and electronics. That boldness marries influences from softer artists Deftones and Radiohead to the obvious notes of the Dillinger Escape Plan and Deafheaven. It all underscores Pupil Slicer’s one rule: There are no rules. —EMILY BELLINO

PHOTO BY GOBINDER JHITTA

PUPIL SLICER

THE POWER OF THREE Doom lords

BELL WITCH unveil the first 83-minute installment of an epic trilogy story by J O S E P H S C H A F E R

JU EE CC I BI B EE LL 34 : A P LY R I L2 0 22 03 2 1: :DD

IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS since Seattle doom duo Bell Witch released their monolithic third album, Mirror Reaper. “Monolithic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but it’s apt for at least two reasons. ¶ First, Mirror Reaper is a massive record: a single, 83-minute song. Second, the album genuinely had some cultural impact: The record was critically acclaimed in these pages and in more mainstream outlets, which led to the band—bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer-keyboardist Jesse Shreibman—performing the monstrosity in its entirety. Spotify reports that close to two million people have listened to the whole thing. ¶ Now, the band has released the follow-up, Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate. In true Bell Witch fashion, it’s an even more grandiose statement that expands the band’s instrumentation and matches its predecessor’s length. According to Bell Witch, though, that runtime is primarily accidental. ¶ “We hyper-focused on certain parts and transitions, but wouldn’t play the whole thing front to back,” says Desmond. “Then when we were recording, we thought, ‘Oh damn, it’s almost the same as the last one—how did that happen?’ I don’t know what weird inner clock is running at 83 minutes. It was not intentional.”

“We’ve been practicing it with no click, and it’s within 20 seconds every time,” Shreibman adds. “Maybe that’s the limit of our own attention span.” Humorous or not, the runtime gestures toward even grander aspirations: As the title suggests, The Clandestine Gate is the first in a planned trilogy of records in the tradition of a classical opera cycle. “We played an incarnation of [Future’s Shadow], most of which will be on record two, on tours with Neurosis and Mono in 2018,” Desmond says. “It fleshed itself out from one simple riff and started expanding.” “We took a big step back and started looking at that set,” Shreibman adds. “Parts had been moving around; some had been expanding. It kept getting pushed into the multiple-album format. It has its own mind at a certain point. You think you’re in the driver’s seat, but the parts start moving on their own; some might resolve much later. Some might resolve on the next record. Some might never resolve. Plotlines in books, series and movies work that way. That’s the approach to this.” “The idea is, at the end [of the Future’s Shadow trilogy], you could loop back to the beginning of [The Clandestine Gate] and listen to the entire cycle continuously,” Desmond says. The cycle begins with an eight-minute synthesizer build that adds a new axis to Bell Witch’s sound: progressive rock. Though their music is

still played at a glacial pace, the technicality and lushness of this song, combined with its arch conceptual framework, is as evocative of Emerson, Lake & Palmer as it is of Thergothon. “The first heavy section on The Clandestine Gate is the most fucked-up timing and tempo Bell Witch has ever done,” Shreibman promises. “I don’t think that we’re harkening to Tangerine Dream or Uriah Heep, but the influences and approach of that time correlate.” But we have to ask: Is Bell Witch a progressive metal band? “How slow can prog dudes count?” Shreibman and Desmond have always included keys in their compositions, but those instruments sometimes lead on The Clandestine Gate. “The synthesizer parts grew,” Shreibman says. “I keep adding things to my set-up. It started with just an organ. My left foot got good enough to add my right foot into playing the organ, so octaves are now involved. I added synthesizers for piano sounds. We always go to studios with Hammond B3 organs and grand pianos, so those are on the record as well. The game-changer was we ran a mellotron over the record in the mixing process. I added a second rack to my set-up.” During the interview, Shreibman sends a photo of a live keyboard rig that would make Rick Wakeman green with envy—it’s as monolithic as Bell Witch’s songs, and costs more than their tour van.

“On our last tour, every night during set-up, I would walk by Jesse and hear him muttering, ‘I did this to myself,’” Desmond giggles. Despite its size, Shreibman can play that rig while drumming. “Live, there is not a single loop ever used, and all of the triggers are foot pianos, so there is no drum pad involved, no click track involved,” he smirks. Bell Witch have always been underrated in terms of technicality: Desmond’s unique bass technique focuses on massive, finger-tapped chords, and Shreibman’s dual-instrumentation requires him to separate rhythms on four limbs across two instruments, all aspects that aren’t always apparent on record. This creates a paradox: As acclaimed as Bell Witch are as a recording project, they’re still better in front of your face. “It’s a cool thing to experience live because you feel it more, and it’s very dynamic.” Shreibman agrees. That may be why Bell Witch announced The Clandestine Gate by playing it live at Roadburn Festival earlier this year. “The last record we announced just by putting the art up, so we thought, ‘Let’s do something different,’” Desmond explains. The decision to roll out their latest in this fashion displays the wellearned confidence that the duo has in The Clandestine Gate, and allows their longest, most sophisticated composition to stand on its own. Until its remaining pieces appear, that is.

The idea is, at the end [of the Future’s Shadow trilogy], you could loop back to the beginning of [The Clandestine Gate] and

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE CYCLE CONTINUOUSLY. DYLAN DESMOND

DD EE CC I BI B EE L L: :A JPURLY IL 2023 1 : 35

NOT WAITING AROUND

Denton death dealers

CREEPING DEATH work to fucking rule

story by JOSEPH SCHAFER /// photo by ADDRIAN JAFARITABAR

reeping Death guitarist Trey Pemberton and vocalist Reese Alavi

are in a jolly mood when they hop onto a super-buggy Zoom call with Decibel, even though they’re halfway through a packed day of interviews at the MNRK office in New York City. The Texans’ optimism can be attributed to the imminent release of their second album, Boundless Domain—a sophomore beatdown that matches the old-school death metal onslaught of their 2019 debut Wretched Illusions while upping the songwriting’s sophistication. ¶ “Every time we write, we’re still trying to figure out what we want Creeping Death to be, and every time we get closer,” says Alavi. “This is the closest we’ve been. I want to involve aspects of everything that we are into to the best of our ability without making some kind of disjointed jambalaya.” ¶ “I focus on feeling when I write a part,” Pemberton adds. “Do I want it to groove? Do I want people to bounce? Do I want them to run in circles? I start from having a basis in a different style of music: I will write a riff and want it to have the same feel as a rap song, or a reggaeton song. Later, people will hear it and say, ‘It reminds me of insert metal band here,’ but when I was writing it, I was thinking about Three 6 Mafia or DJ Screw. I always want to try something new that we as a band have not done before.” EE CC I BI B EE LL 36 : J AU P LY R I L2 0 22 03 2 1: :DD

On Boundless Domain, those new things include: more layered, melodic and varied guitar tones from Pemberton and fellow guitarist A.J. Ross (see the overdriven chorus on the country-fried intro to the title track); plus intricate percussion from drummer Lincoln Mullins (highlighted on album closer “The Common Breed”); and Alavi growling toe-to-toe with Cannibal Corpse’s George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher on lead single “Intestinal Wrap.” “I’m a drummer by trade, and I’m a selftaught guitarist, but I didn’t want every riff to be chromatic,” Pemberton says. “I wanted there to be more parts that would stick in your head, riffs and solos with melodies that you could hum along to. Adam was a big part of making that happen.” He’s referring to Adam Dutkiewicz, esteemed guitarist and producer of metalcore luminaries Killswitch Engage, who spent three weeks across two studios in California crafting Boundless Domain with Creeping Death, a seismic

shift compared to what they’re used to: writing EPs and even a whole record in under two months, and recording them in a week or less. Dutkeiwicz’s typically pristine production style highlights Creeping Death’s songwriting without dulling their aggression. “He said he’s never seen a band use this much gain, and he’s never had a band smoke this much weed in the studio,” Pemberton says with a grin, recalling the sessions. “He’s the funniest, most depraved human being I’ve ever met. He fit our vibe perfectly,” Alavi agrees. Which isn’t to say Dutkiewicz made their recording session a cakewalk. “He’s a ball-buster,” Alavi continues, describing Dutkiewicz’s perfectionist streak. “A.J. did a take and Adam would say, ‘Off time’—click! And delete it. He’d try it again. ‘Out of tune’—click! Then, ‘Out of tune and off time!’—click! Adam was like, ‘How is that even possible?’” Dutkiewicz didn’t reserve his ribbing to just Ross, either. “Once he said to me and A.J., ‘Between your right hand and [A.J’s] left hand, together the band has one good guitarist.” Pemberton laughs. “But A.J. and I both come from a sports background, so the ball-busting works for us. And he was right: I started working on my left hand, and the solos got better.” It will take more than great coaching and production to make Creeping Death’s global footprint match the band’s high ambitions: They’re calling Decibel in the middle of a tour opening for Carcass and Municipal Waste, and expect to spend more time on the road afterward.

“I don’t want to call it a grind set, but you’ve got to grind, you need to tour,” Alavi says. “Touring is the sickest thing you’ll ever do that can suck more than anything you’ve ever done. It’s like prison. You wake up at two, work until midnight, then go to sleep while someone drives all night.” “We’re all from a blue-collar background. We understand that even if something is going to suck for a little while, you just get to work,” Pemberton says. “We have a saying in Texas: Country boys make do.” Creeping Death committed to that hardscrabble attitude while coming up in the fertile Texas metal and hardcore scene that produced them and other rising talents like Frozen Soul, Tribal Gaze and Narrow Head. It’s a scene that took a thrashing in

Touring is the sickest thing you’ll ever do that can suck more than anything you’ve ever done.

IT’S LIKE PRISON.

YOU WAKE UP AT TWO, WORK UNTIL MIDNIGHT, THEN GO TO SLEEP WHILE SOMEONE DRIVES ALL NIGHT. REESE ALAVI

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2020 with the too-soon passing of Iron Age’s Wade Allison and Power Trip’s Riley Gale. “It was a tough two years for Texans,” says Alavi, who called Gale a neighbor (“I could throw a baseball and hit his pad”) and a friend, and who named the title track in his memory. “‘Boundless Domain’ refers to a fictional character, but it’s about Riley. The lyric is not referring to a physical place, but the words are, ‘his mind, a boundless domain.’ Because he was always reading and was an insightful dude.” Tellingly, Alavi and Pemberton refer to Gale in both past and present tense when they speak. “We’re just trying to do right by the Texas scene,” Pemberton adds, in the lone solemn moment of an otherwise triumphant conversation.

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DD EE CC I BI B EE L L: :A JPURLY IL 2023 1 : 37

interview by

QA j. bennett

VLAD WI T H

THE INHALER

PERSEKUTOR mastermind on Old World ankles, video vixens and “freezings to death”

3 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

hen I first met the man who calls himself Vlad the Inhaler, I wasn’t Or maybe prostitutes is doings this. I mean

sure what to think. I was in a bar in Romania 17 years ago when I struck up a conversation with a woman in a Darkthrone T-shirt who told me her cousin was a musician. I made the mistake of telling her that I write about metal bands for a living, and she insisted that I meet him. After a bumpy ride on a dirt road in a local “bus” (it was a wheezing minivan with a cracked windshield and one headlight) alongside a few babushkas in headscarves and at least one chicken in a cage, we arrived at a stone hut on the edge of the Carpathians. There, I was introduced to a tall man named Vladislav who told me he had a band called Persekutor. He was very much inspired by black metal, he said, but also hard rock of the 1970s and ’80s. He played me a cassette of Persekutor’s first record, Angels of Meth. I’ve never heard anything like it before or since. When I got home, I called Albert immediately. It became one of the first albums in Decibel’s then-short history to receive a perfect 10/10 score. ¶ Fast-forward to 2018, and our man Vlad is living in Los Angeles. He’s hooked up with some local musicians—Inverted Chris from Lightning Swords of Death and my old Ides of Gemini bandmates Adam Hell Murray and Scott Batiste. They release the Permanent Winter album in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. Against almost everyone’s advice, they record another album during lockdown. Entitled Snow Business, it’s coming out on Blues Funeral on June 23. It’s an insanely catchy combination of first-wave black metal (specifically Venom and Celtic Frost) and ’80s flash metal (specifically Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe), but weirder and with a sense of humor. They’ve recently added a second guitar player in Blake Meahl, formerly of Huntress, and a new drummer in Tyler Meahl (Blake’s brother), formerly of Holy Grail. I recently caught up with our man at a titty bar in Portland, OR. Remember that time we met in Romania? That was weird.

Yes, of course! Cousin Daciana is introducings us. We gets shit-hammered on the homemade plum brandy, very old family recipe. Auntie Safta with the Old World ankles is always brewings a batch in toilet. You gots naked! That was strong booze. I still think you spiked it with something.

Perish the thoughts! But yes, I remember it must has been very cold out, because your… Because we could see our breath! And there were icicles everywhere. And snow!

[Laughs] Yes, yes. Of course! Not because any other reason.

song is famous rock stars with large appetites and large bank accounts, so I am surprised there is any cocaine lefts for the rest of us. Ace Frehley, Black Sabbath, Sly Stone and the other guys I am givings shouts out to, they put it into the face like vacuum cleaner. Speaking of cocaine, what’s going on in that video for your new song, “Night Job”?

Oh, I breathe the cocaine into Phil Vera’s face. But is OK, he volunteer for this. Also, he is recordings the new album, and the last one also. The video depicts a drug heist. You’re robbing a drug dealer, played by Phil from Despise You, Crom and Trappist.

It is summing up what are doings best: songs about ice, snow and freezings to death. But the title track is about the cocaine.

Yes. And then I am gettings shot in leg by one of his goons. And then same goon is shootings the cops that is sniffing around our party van full of prostitutes. I mean video vixens! James Luna from Intranced band and Holy Grail is tryings to shoot at me also, but he is havings fake gun and real eye patch.

What cocaine?

Huh?

All of it. The peoples I am talking about in the

In end of video, it turns out I do all the drugs.

What’s the story behind the title of your new album, Snow Business?

PHOTO BY JESSICA LUNA

video vixens. Well, at least the song makes sense. Somehow, it reminds me of Def Leppard and Venom at the same time.

They is two of the greatest bands in the history of recordination, so I will take this as compliment. You’ve got a video for the title track that’s a little less complicated than the “Night Job” video.

Yes, no story for “Snow Business” video, just killer performance. White room, white light, white heat! Also, white pointy guitars. Was about times we are doings performance-style video. This is what we is best at. Are you planning to release any more singles or videos before the album drops in June?

Yes, keep eyeballs out for cool video for new song “Suck City”! Will be like Repo Man meets Repo Man. What’s the story behind that song?

Is about the unstoppable tide of history. Everyones from the last czar of Russian Empire to everyday peoples can have lives thrown into turmoil—or even gets killed—by events out of their controls. Is also about freezings to death. The band Cop Shoot Cop had a song called “Suck City (Here We Come).” Is that where you got the inspiration?

No, I am only learnings this recently. Title was inspired by book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which is one of first books I am tryings to read in English after The Lorax. They later make into movie with Robert De Niro, but this was not very good film. You’re actually singing on a couple of the new songs instead of just yelling. I’m thinking of “The Frozen Hours” and “Feel Bad Hit of the Winter.” What brought that on?

I am thinking it is good to expand the Persekutor sound. Even favorite bands like Motörhead, who is always accused of doings same things over and over, actually did not do this. They has albums like Another Perfect Day and songs like “I Ain’t No Nice Guy” and “1916,” which was quite a bit different. To me, what we are doings with the songs you mention is like this, but not even as extreme of detour. Is not like they are ballads, you know? You’ve got two new members in the band— Blake Meahl from Huntress on guitar, and his brother Tyler, from Holy Grail, on drums. How did that happen?

We are talkings about gettings second guitar player for little while before I am meetings D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 3 9

California freezin’  Mr. the Inhaler (c) and the rest of Persekutor go from suck to blow

We makes songs you will remember and we is the antidote to the Fun Police.

In February, you did a “California World Tour” with the band Nite. At the Hollywood show, I saw female fans throwing panties at you guys while you were onstage. Is that a regular thing?

Oh yes, this is happenings all the time. The best ones I am savings and keepings in jacket pocket for whenevers I need a hit. A hit?

You are not doings panty hits? You are missings out, man! I know a guy who is collectings street panties, he keep thems in plastic bag for freshness whenevers he needs a hit. But I am not down with the street panties—no. I am likings to know where the panties is comings from. There are some strange Persekutor stories out there. Is it true that your first show ended 4 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

in a stabbing?

First US and A show, yes. We are openings for Brazilian band Power of Hell, downtown Los Angeles in 2018. Somebody is gettings stabbed and then whole show is swarm with police. I am gettings separated from rest of band—and our van—by police barricade and wall of cops. First introduction to LAPD for me. Slightly better than many people’s I am guessings. You haven’t been in this country for very long, but you’ve already managed to get a couple of Persekutor songs into horror movies. “Power Frost” was in Beyond the Gates in 2016, and “Brain Freeze” was in Christmas Bloody Christmas on Shudder last year. How did you manage that?

Directors and music supervisors with sophistications and taste will choose Persekutor every time. Is scientifically proven fact. Fun story: I am gettings to meet Barbara Crampton from Re-Animator and Chopping Mall at Beyond the Gates premiere because she is havings small role in this film also. She is very nice lady—and still lookings good! You guys released the cassette-only EP Brain Freeze late last year. What can you tell us about it?

We are doings the cassette because the song “Brain Freeze” is comings out in Christmas Bloody

Christmas film many months before the Snow Business album is beings released, which was meant to be original releasings of the song. So instead we release a version with different guitar solo on the cassette, and the original guitar solo on the album. Then we add nonalbum track “Blizzard of ’78” plus AC/DC cover and Iron Maiden cover to cassette tape. You did AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You,” which is a pretty greasy song. Why did you choose it?

I love this track since first time I hear it, but also because AC/DC is never playings it live. Not even once. So, only way to hear song live is at Persekutor show. This is same reason we are sometimes doings Darkthrone “Too Old Too Cold.” You will never see Darkthrone do it. Persekutor clearly like to have fun, which is not something the extreme metal world is known for. Has that been a hindrance in your climb to the top?

This I could not say, but I know that many band suffer from terminal case of takings themselves too serious. They make not-catchy-at-all supertech complicated song because they like to sniff their own fart or something like this. You will never catch us commitings this kind of atrocity. We makes songs you will remember and we is the antidote to the Fun Police.

PHOTO BY CARMEN MONOXIDE

Blake and his wife Toni at concert here in Los Angeles. They are inviting me to make party at their house, and we becomes friend. A couple months later, I am poppings the question! Blake agree to join, and Toni is becomings merch queen for band also. Sometimes after this, our lead drummer Scott Batiste is movings to New Mexico. We keeps it together for little while, but then he is becomings very busy with job workings on movie sets, so he gives us blessings to have Tyler join band. I am feelings very thankful that it is all workings out.

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the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

story by

dutch pearce photos by

diona mavis

A Roll of Thunder, a Flash of Lightning the making of Thorr’s Hammer’s Dommedagsnatt

efore there was Sunn O))), there

structing some of the heaviest and was Thorr’s Hammer. Now, the most devastating music ever to befall word “legendary” gets tossed human ears. around a lot, but few bands We spoke with O’Malley one early can actually bear such a hefty spring morning while he strolled through description. A band like Thorr’s his local cemetery in Paris. We found Hammer—Seattle’s female-fronted deathAnderson amidst his Southern Lord doom quintet, which lasted for less than two empire on the West Coast. Sykes is back in months and then disbanded—are more than the Pacific Northwest. Catching up with legendary. Thorr’s Hammer are mythological. the members nearly 30 years after the The band started sometime between fact meant asking some of them to talk DBHOF223 winter ’94 to spring of ’95. They played about their very first bands. In the case only two shows before their reunion gigs of Anderson, O’Malley and Sykes, that in 2009 and ’10. Most notably, the group almost meant untangling and parsing the featured a Norwegian singer whose face brief existence of Thorr’s Hammer from and likeness is now printed on thousands Burning Witch, the band they formed Dommedagsnatt of CDs, records, shirts, longsleeves and after Gammelsæter’s return to Norway. SOUT HE R N LOR D hoodies worldwide (whether official, Inevitably, the legend of this band is com1998 bootleg and/or handmade). Yet, she was posed of different oral histories. Facts are only in the band for less than the span relegated to personal, sometimes conflictTrollin’ in the deep of one season. And what moves faster ing opinions, and details are like faces in than those halcyon days of our late teens an impressionist painting. That is to say and early 20s? For their part, drummer blurry suggestions, frequently filled in by Jamie “Boggy” Sykes, bassist James Hale, someone’s own narrative. What remains guitarists Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, and vocalist Runhild is the overwhelming notion that these songs document a time that was Gammelsæter spent some of that time in a basement in Ballard, WA, con- truly remarkable. Even mythological.

THORR’S HAMMER

D E C I B E L : 4 3 : J U LY 2 0 2 3

DBHOF223

THORR’S HAMMER dommedagsnatt

How did Thorr’s Hammer come together? What were you doing prior to the band forming, and how did you meet everyone? RUNHILD GAMMELSÆTER: I was an exchange student at University of Washington studying natural sciences while we started Thorr’s Hammer, but had already lived in Seattle for several years with my family. My father’s work brought us there in the early 1990s, at the cusp of [the grunge era]. I was around 15 when I met Stephen at a Carcass and Napalm Death concert in 1992. We were both underage and weren’t allowed entry, so we were hanging at the back door listening in on the show. Legendary gig—Carcass were my biggest idols; seeing Bill [Steer] and Jeff [Walker] do their growling duos was a huge thing for me—but most importantly, I met this guy with sideburns as long as his hair wearing an Entombed T-shirt: one of my favorite bands at the time. Stephen and I exchanged phone numbers, and for the next year we hung out and listened to strange music few others had interest in. Amazing to think that we have been friends for 30 years. Stephen introduced me to Greg and Jamie, and the rest is history. STEPHEN O’MALLEY: Last week, I was thinking about this, trying to piece it together. I met Runhild in the summer of ’92 at a death metal show at a club called the Rock Candy [RKCNDY], to see Carcass. We were both underage. So, we’re both standing outside; the security would leave the back door open for underage people to listen and to see the show. Greg and I knew each other for quite a long time. Actually, we grew up in the same area of Seattle and went to the same high school. He was close with my best friend’s older sister. And I was a fan of some of his bands back then. But later—in ’93, I believe—we ran into each other at Tower Records. He had heard Wolverine Blues from Entombed, and I was super into death metal and black metal at the time. So, I remember we got together a few times, played guitar in his basement. Then we met Jamie. We crossed paths with him and started playing together because he had a Melvins tattoo. GREG ANDERSON: My first girlfriend in high school had this little brother who was really into goth music and stuff. I was really into hardcore and I turned him on to hardcore. He got really into it, and he ended up starting a band. He got all these people in our neighborhood into hardcore. Everyone was really clean-cut-looking hardcore kids with crew cuts and sweatpants. I was older than them, but I’d run into them here and there, and they always had this dude with them. Bunch of clean-cut straight-edge kids with this guy with super long black hair and massive sideburns. I was like, “Who’s this guy?” They were like, “Oh, hey Greg, this is our friend Rocker Steve.” He kind of smiled, embarrassed,

“Stephen [O’Malley] sort of made fun of me at the time, but I heard Entombed for the first time because I got Wolverine Blues for like a dollar in a bargain bin, like around the time it came out. In Seattle, extreme metal was just not popular at the time.”

G RE G A ND E RSO N and said, like, “Yeah, man, I’m really into death metal,” or whatever. Then I ended up running into him a couple years later at a Tower Records in Seattle. We started talking about music. At the time, I was starting to get into a lot of the early ’90s death metal on Earache—Entombed, Cathedral. And he was like, “Oh, man! You ought to hear…” And he goes to the Ds, and he’s like, “You ever hear diSEMBOWELMENT? You gotta check this out. If you’re into slow music and super heavy and extreme, you’re gonna love this.” I bought the record that day. That started me down a path. We exchanged numbers and started hanging out. I started turning him onto stuff that I was listening to at the time. Like, there was this German experimental guitar player named Caspar Brötzmann that I was really into. Stuff like Slint. I was turning him onto electric jazz and weird experimental stuff and he was turning me onto Grief, Winter, Thergothon. We just started exchanging music [...] Then Stephen was like, “Hey man, we should play some music together.” Soon after, we found Jamie, or Boggy. Boggy had a style to me that was very influenced by Dale Krover from the Melvins. Which was like hitting the jackpot. JAMIE “BOGGY” SYKES: When I first moved to Seattle, you know, it’s like, you look in the newspaper for “Musicians looking for bands.” I can’t remember the name of the magazine, but it’s J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 4 4 : D E C I B E L

a free one they have up there in Seattle. I was looking in the back and it said, “Black metal band looking for a drummer.” That was Malleus Maleficarum. I called them up and played with them for a little while, but that was it. It just didn’t work out. I met Steve because the guitarist Chris was a really good friend of Steve’s. I was into stuff like Melvin’s Killdozer as well, early Butthole Surfers. So, I found a few bands that played that stuff. The band that I was playing in when I met Greg was 3D House of Beef. Steve brought Greg to one of the 3D House of Beef rehearsals, and that’s when we started doing Thorr’s Hammer. JAMES HALE: I met Greg through my roommate Tim Cook, who worked at C/Z Records, the home of Engine Kid [Anderson’s band] at the time. I loved that band, and Tim took me to some shows and I got to know Greg a little. I worked at a recording studio owned by Gary King called the House of Leisure. Gary is best known for his involvement in the first few Gruntruck recordings, helping Jack Endino with some engineering here and there. By no means was it a standard space you could call a recording studio, but a 40-foot square former auto shop with a corner built into a control room, and a few makeshift isolation booths. One day, someone asked me, I think, if I wanted to play bass with this thing Greg was doing. So, being a veteran thrash metal bass player from bands I was in growing up in Hawaii, I thought it would be fun, whatever it was…

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THORR’S HAMMER dommedagsnatt What do you remember most about Thorr’s Hammer practices? GAMMELSÆTER: There weren’t that many of them!

Thorr’s Hammer was a very short-lived band. What was the timeline as best as you can recall? GAMMELSÆTER: I feel it was much longer, and

it still feels like I am in that band. We had a couple of reunion shows, and it is always the same feeling hanging with the guys: “hammer time.” But you are right: We were only active for a short time in the spring of 1995. Growling was my party trick, and at one of many feasts in my small flat, Greg exclaimed that we needed to start a band—and we did. That summer I returned to Norway, while Greg and Stephen moved to L.A. and became rock stars. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been if I stayed in the U.S. and went on tour with the guys in a beat-up van. O’MALLEY: I think Greg said in an interview somewhere recently that it was six weeks, and that struck me as being a bit short, but I might be mixing up a bunch of different events together. Greg and I got together a few times in the basement of the house he was living in at the time. Smoking weed and writing riffs—that was the genesis of a lot of things, that basement. I remember he was driving me home— someone was driving me home—and we were talking about getting a singer. “What about your friend Runhild?” We knew she was super into Carcass and would growl along to the songs while she was driving her car around Seattle. So, I asked Runhild and she said yes. She had just finished high school. We were both at the University of Washington. We were so young. It’s crazy. ANDERSON: Exactly. It was so short-lived. By the time the cassette came out, we were already broken up and we were on to the next thing. But this was the first thing for Stephen that was like actually doing something and putting something together with other people. I was wanting to do something obviously different than Engine Kid, musically. So, it was just like, “Okay, well, let’s just go for it. Let’s experiment with this stuff.” SYKES: We recorded three to four weeks after finishing the songs. That’s because Runhild only had like seven weeks left before she was back to Norway. That’s why we did it so quickly. It’s literally six-and-a-half to seven weeks, the whole thing. Me, Greg and Steve starting to jam with Runhild there. Then there’s recording. [Two] shows, the recording, then she’s gone to Norway. That was it. The band was kind of over. HALE: Like my usual recordings, I had no time for anything since the band had no budget, and the first song was a bit of a trainwreck; but the second song, after I had a chance to figure things out and dialed in the tones a bit more, was far superior in sound quality.

We borrowed gear and a practice space, and it was my first time using a microphone. I used to drink chocolate milk to keep the voice going. Long rehearsals are hard on the vocal cords. O’MALLEY: I think there might’ve only been a few practices and maybe they were in the Engine Kid practice space. I don’t really know, [somewhere] in downtown Seattle. And I didn’t have any gear. That was another thing. So, our first show, I was borrowing all of the gear from friends, but we only played two shows. I didn’t even own a guitar. I think I was using Greg’s Les Paul copy at practice. ANDERSON: [When Runhild] started growling—holy shit. We got in the practice space together, and it was just like, “Oh my God!” The sounds that were coming out of this tiny woman were like, “What the fuck?” You know, it just made what we were doing even more freakish. Everything was just so just so out-of-place and different from what we had done before. SYKES: When Greg and Steve came into 3D House of Beef rehearsal, it was kind of not working out for me anyway. That was my last rehearsal with the band. Actually, I do believe the very first rehearsal could have been just me and Steve and Greg. I think maybe Runhild came in on the next one. Those three had been friends for a while. They’d been hanging out. It was an arranged thing. They wanted to do something for Runhild. When we started, it was mainly me, Greg, Steve and Runhild. I do believe that’s what it was, and then we got James, who recorded us, who plays bass on the recording. We got him after the first couple practices. I do believe the first rehearsal was just those four. I remember Runhild had all her lyrics written down. They were all in Norwegian. HALE: I remember arriving at a packed, tiny room of mostly drums, and dragging my gear into the place. I then tuned my vintage BC Rich Mockingbird down from E to A. Strings were rattling. Going through the songs, they just played them and I tried to follow. Because of time, each song was played once or twice. I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow remembered all the songs having only heard/played them two or three times over two practices. What were some of your biggest influences for Thorr’s Hammer’s sound? ANDERSON: I was really into Forest of Equilibrium, the Cathedral album. Steve was into black metal—like, he was really into the Norwegian black metal scene. I didn’t want to play anything super fast. So, we kind of met in the middle. [Stephen] was also really into Melvins, of course, and the slow stuff, but like I said, he was really, really into Darkthrone, Burzum and Mayhem during that time period as well. We were both J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 4 6 : D E C I B E L

obsessed with Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, and we were like, “Let’s start there.” And we were making up riffs together in my grandma’s basement in Ballard, Washington. I think at that point, my mom, my brother and I had taken over the house, and my grandma had moved into assisted living. We were in her house, but it was like this really small basement. It’s the house that my mom grew up in. Eventually, my grandma returned back to the house for us to take care of her while she was in the last phase of her life, and we were playing this ridiculously noisy cacophony in the basement—probably stoned, I would imagine. Just trying to make some sounds together that were slow and heavy. GAMMELSÆTER: I honestly don’t think we tried to sound like anyone else. Stephen had been inventing his unique doom riffs for years, and Greg brought his savvy style from Engine Kid and a ton of fuzz pedals. Jamie brought a touch of Black Sabbath—but when we were describing the sound we were looking for, I seem to remember he said, “Oh, you mean like Swans?” I was into Norwegian black metal, doom, gore and really slow, ultra-deep things like diSEMBOWELMENT. It was a mixing pot really—grunge around us, black metal emerging in Norway, and gore and doom bands ruling the underground. O’MALLEY: It was more Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Eyehategod, Grief, Melvins and diSEMBOWELMENT. For me, the band was always more about trying to play slow and heavy, but also really inspired by Hellhammer. The stuff we would do right after Thorr’s Hammer, when Greg came back from his tour—he, Jamie and I, that would become Burning Witch—that was more influenced by Winter. Thorr’s Hammer is so primitive—really basic riffs. Framed by Jamie’s drumming and, of course, Runhild’s charisma. SYKES: I’ve been playing drums since I was 12, and I started playing in bands, like gigging bands when I was 15. So, I’ve always been playing in bands, but Seattle back then, it was a grunge scene. It was huge. I mean, I think Kurt Cobain passed away about six months to a year before [my wife and I] got there. So, the music scene was still huge over there. It wasn’t like the metal stuff I was used to [in the U.K.]. I think Steve and Greg, especially, just wanted to do something with Runhild because, you know, ’cause of her voice and because she was going to be leaving soon. So, they came up with the doom band and it worked out. Runhild, who was your personal inspiration as far as death metal vocalists go? Were you in any bands back in Norway before you traveled to Seattle? GAMMELSÆTER: Thorr’s Hammer was my

first—and in many ways only—band. My other ventures have been more project-based collaborations, duo and solo. I played the trombone in

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THORR’S HAMMER dommedagsnatt

“There was a die-hard fan in the audience trying to make eye contact, so I was closing my eyes, except when reading my lyrics, which were written on my arm since I hadn’t had a chance to memorize them yet.”

R U N H ILD GA MME LSÆT E R school band, though [laughs], and actually started my music career as bassist. My dad bought me a Fender Jazz bass when I was 12, and I played with a girlfriend who had a guitar and sang, and a guy we knew who had drums. We composed our own songs, mostly using the chords E and A. In my teens, I used to “sing” along with Carcass, Entombed, Deicide and the first Darkthrone records, and discovered I could growl. I was like 16 and didn’t realize it was unusual for girls to be able to do that. I really can’t sing clean. Can hardly hold a tune, but I do it anyway because I like honest, raw and imperfect voices—they express more emotion. I do like contrasts, but it was also a way to show the audience that I wasn’t faking, using the same microphone as when I was growling. No pedals. What do you remember about the extreme metal scene in Seattle back then in the ’90s? GAMMELSÆTER: The live music scene at the time

was fantastic, and I went to a lot of shows. I remember our surprise when the underground bands of Seattle went mainstream. “Nirvana are on national radio!” I had Bleach on cassette and was into things like Earth and Alice in Chains, and remember awesome shows with Tad, Mudhoney and Sky Cries Mary. The shows were super crowded with mosh pits, and crowd-surfing was a big thing, which I actively participated in. Being sweaty with ripped clothes and a stiff neck for days due to headbanging were typical after-effects of concerts.

ANDERSON: Stephen sort of made fun of me at the time, but I heard Entombed for the first time because I got Wolverine Blues for like a dollar in a bargain bin, like around the time it came out. In Seattle, extreme metal was just not popular at the time. You would be able to get a lot of extreme metal releases for nothing, you know? I didn’t have any money, so I was like, cool, let me check out this Heartwork record. Stephen basically opened the gates for me. He was doing his fanzine [Descent] at the time, too. So, there’s all this information and connection to all these groups that he was sharing with me; it was really awesome. I was a sponge, taking it all in and really enjoying it all.

How did the Seattle scene receive Thorr’s Hammer? What do you remember about those first shows? GAMMELSÆTER: I remember some people trying to

headbang in the front row, shouting, “Don’t you have any fast songs?!” The first show was quite dramatic. I was underage and had to sneak in the back door carrying an amp to get into the club. There was a die-hard fan in the audience trying to make eye contact, so I was closing my eyes, except when reading my lyrics, which were written on my arm since I hadn’t had a chance to memorize them yet. Think there was a fight in the audience as well, someone smashing a table. Also, I had new shoes, which I kept for years as a memory. O’MALLEY: That was in early ‘95. There were two shows. I mean, it was our friends at the shows. J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 4 8 : D E C I B E L

Seattle has an amazing music scene, and after, I guess in the early 2000s ’til now, the metal underground scene has been really strong there. But at that time, it wasn’t so strong. There were a few bands. Of course, pre-internet and all that, those were small shows. I think it was called Red Dragon, or the China Club. It had two names. It was in the back of a Chinese restaurant. The other show we played was in a small theater in the Pioneer Square area called Velvet Elvis that had punk and hardcore shows. China Club was in Ballard, not far from where Greg and I started playing music together. I’m not sure who else played those shows, actually. I think at China Club, the band Darkenwood may have played. But Burning Witch also played that venue. Burning Witch played there with Napalm Death and At the Gates. I think the show with Thorr’s Hammer was Darkenwood and Thorr’s Hammer. But Jamie was playing with Darkenwood, too, I think. At the Velvet Elvis, I don’t remember who else played. The photo on the demo—I call it the tape—the photo of Runhild in the white dress, that’s from the Velvet Elvis show. Greg is wearing the Earache Records shirt, and you see Jamie playing drums. ANDERSON: We played two shows. A buddy of mine, the bass player from Engine Kid, recorded one of them. It was this place called the China Club in Ballard. Ballard is where we started the band, man, in my grandma’s basement. Ballard is this crazy place in Seattle. It’s kind of off the water, and there’s a huge population

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THORR’S HAMMER dommedagsnatt

of Norwegians that live there. That’s how it’s always been. Because of Norwegian black metal, because of Runhild, we’ve always claimed Ballard. It’s like this weird, little Norwegian village where they have all these little Norwegian shops and bakeries, and they sell lutefisk. So, when I first met Runhild, we joked about it: “Have you ever been to Ballard?” “Yeah, haha! It’s so fake!” So, our first show was at this place that was a Chinese restaurant in Ballard. That was probably, literally, man, not even joking, it was probably a half-mile from my grandma’s basement, where we wrote all the music. So, they started doing rock and metal—and a lot of grunge, of course— shows there. Which was weird because all that stuff would happen in downtown Seattle, or Capitol Hill, which had a lot of thriving clubs. So, it was really kind of out of place and out of the way, so not a lot of people would go there. Plus, it’s a Chinese restaurant—it’s just weird. But I went in there and asked if they booked bands. They asked what kind of music and I said, “Oh, you know, it’s like rock ‘n’ roll.” They were like, “Oh, cool,” and I was like, “Yeah, we’re kinda heavy,” and they were like, “All right! Cool! Do you have a demo and then we can call you if we like it?” So, I think we gave them something else. I don’t even remember what we gave them. It might have been like Celtic Frost. I think it was like a Tuesday, they gave us, or a Monday night when there was nothing else going on. If I remember correctly, I think we got some of Odin’s [Thompson, owner of Moribund Records] bands he was working with. I think Stephen was like, “Hey, we got a show.” I think the band was called... Darkenwood, thank you! And I think Drawn and Quartered? I think there was three bands. Darkenwood I remember, for sure, because the lead guitar player was this character we referred to as Cocaine Chris, and he loaned Stephen his guitar to play that show. Because Stephen didn’t have any gear. I really remember Drawn and Quartered because I’m almost positive there was three bands that played that night. Anyway, Brian [Kraft] from Engine Kid taped the whole thing on VHS. Then a couple years later, after we’d done the first run of CDs [of the demo], he hit me up and he was like, “Dude, I still have that Thorr’s Hammer live show from the China Club.” He digitized it for me or something and he sent it over. Then I hit up Scott Carlson [of Repulsion] and was like, “Hey, can you help me get this onto a CD?” He helped with the titling and stuff, too. SYKES: Like I said, everything’s in seven weeks. We were practicing, but we were trying to get in a few shows before [Runhild] left. I’d say the

first show was about four weeks in. I think we may have recorded first. That’s when we got [James] on bass. Because we arranged with him, like, “Can we get this recording done?” I think. Like I said, it’s all a blur. I’m sorry. We had a great time, but that’s all that I can remember. What do you remember about the recording process? HALE: The recording process was a single day. The usual rushed setup. O’Malley used a bunch of borrowed shit that in no way resembled a metal guitar setup. Some generic amp head with some no-name crunch pedal and the least metal of guitars ever—a Strat or some variation of a generic single coil pickup style guitar. All takes are single takes, no editing or punch-ins. It was impossible to punch in, since we were recording the whole band, sans vox, and I was in the control room playing along. The machine used was a TASCAM one-inch 16-track, and the console was nothing special, some prosumer thing that neither sucked or excelled. Microphones were the standard array of dynamic and condenser workhorses you will find anywhere, augmented with a few exotic ribbons and SDCs I owned. GAMMELSÆTER: I think “fast” sums it up. We had little money and could only afford one DAT tape, so there wasn’t space for many takes. It was my first time in a studio, so I remember it vividly. We did simultaneous takes, sitting in different rooms, which was difficult. Onstage, I often cue in by reading riffs on Stephen and Greg’s guitar necks, or looking for Jamie to raise his hands before hitting the riders. I couldn’t see them play, so I had to count riffs. Then I remember being super happy about being able to do a retake on my clean vocals. Those vocals are much more difficult for me than the growling. O’MALLEY: Actually, at the recording, I didn’t have a guitar. There was a Strat in the studio [laughs] that I ended up playing through some amp that was there. And downtuning the slinky strings. That’s why the tone of my guitar sounds like spaghetti: loose, sloppy strings. Which I’ve heard bands do, like, deliberately—tuning down the light-gauge strings. But that was part of it. The passion and the playing of the music, the gear didn’t matter. I don’t even remember which amp I was playing. ANDERSON: I was touring a lot at the time, and I didn’t really have anywhere to live, so I was free and had no responsibilities. And Runhild was leaving, too. James was like, “Hey, I got this studio we can go record this stuff at.” James was a really nice guy, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He also did an Engine Kid recording at the same time. But at that time period—like, now, 30 years have gone by, and you’ve got people that have been doing this stuff their entire lives. So, they know what sounds best. But back then, it was just a crapshoot. That’s why some of those records sound like garbage. Of course, that’s part J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 5 0 : D E C I B E L

of the charm, too. If the band actually means it, and it’s not a pose, it can come through. That’s what Thorr’s Hammer was. Technically, it’s shit, but we were so into what we were doing. SYKES: I’d say the first show was probably about four weeks in. I think we may have recorded after getting James on bass. I remember the recording studio. Massive room where the drums were set up. There was stuff stored in there as well—huge room. You could have had a buffet with 100 people in there, totally fine. The studio was a little room with all the recording stuff in there. They had partitions and stuff, but I was in a massive room and Steve was to the right of me. His stuff was partitioned off, and I could just see the light of the studio. Real dark. We were in there for about two days. We recorded in one day and then mixed it down the second day. Runhild recorded all her vocals, got ’em all down the same day we recorded. It was cool, man. The opening “ough” on “Norge” is like a light turning off. It’s like a chair flying through the room and hitting you in the face. GAMMELSÆTER: That “ough” is Stephen, by the

way—he and Greg are also backing vocalists on “Troll.” Stephen was psyched about having his own microphone. I don’t often listen to my own music, but this record still makes me smile, and I still think the riffs are truly excellent and that there are interesting elements in the breaks, like that “ough” you mention. We made the type of music we like, and I would probably listen to it if it was another band. The band was so short-lived. How do you remember feeling at its end? GAMMELSÆTER: It was a difficult decision to

return to Norway. I had lived in the U.S. for five years and started a university education. Realized that if I completed my studies in the U.S., it would be many years until I could return to Norway. At the same time, all my friends— and my band—were in the U.S. It was actually more difficult to move back to Norway at 19 than it was to move to the U.S. when I was 14. We met up several times after I returned, in both the U.S. and Europe, and we had several reunion concerts. I have also attended Sunn O))) shows and hung out in various cities over the years. O’MALLEY: My friend was leaving. It’s too bad about the band, but we were really close friends. At the same time, I was happy for [Runhild]. She was moving on to this really exciting job, which led her down—as has been written about and is known—this really amazing road for her scientific research. The band was just getting off the ground, but I don’t remember having any ambitions with it, besides just getting together for practice. ANDERSON: I’m extremely grateful, and everything I look back on with that is really fond memories. It was the beginning of mine and

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THORR’S HAMMER dommedagsnatt  Reaping the seeds of doom

Anderson (r) and O’Malley’s long partnership culminates in a live Thorr’s Hammer reunion, circa 2009

ANDERSON: There was this guy who lived on, like, Port Orchard, something pretty far away. Maybe even a ferry to get there. This character named Odin, and he had Moribund Records. Which, at that time, was one of the first and sort of classic extreme metal labels of the ’90s. He was really enthusiastic about what we were doing. Again, because no one in Seattle was doing that. He offered to put our demo on Moribund. We were like, “Whoa! Wow! That’s a big deal.” I don’t even remember how it all happened, because everything that happened with this band was after we broke up.

There have been a lot of interesting covers over the years for the various reissues. What about the 2004 reissues with Runhild brandishing the torch and looking quite black metal? Who remembers this shoot? GAMMELSÆTER: I most certainly do! We went to

STE P H E N O ’ M A L L EY Stephen’s friendship. Of course, I’m still very close with Stephen, but Runhild as well. It’s cool that we’re all still friends and alive. And Jamie, too. Of course, I don’t see him as much. We’re still in contact. The only person I lost contact with is James. SYKES: It was a great seven weeks. I wouldn’t change anything. It was amazing. It was only seven weeks. I’m glad we did do a couple more shows in 2012. Dommedagsnatt originally came out on cassette via Moribund Records in 1996. How did that come about? O’MALLEY: Moribund Records/Odin Thompson offered to put it out on tape, and we did that. I was friends with Odin, and I was working with him a little bit, helping him pack mailorder for Moribund distro. In ’93, ’94, I met him. He worked at a record store in the U District in Seattle called Second Time Around, which had a metal section. I was there; I was like 19, looking through the metal section. He came up, he was

like, “Hey, are you into this stuff? Oh, yeah, I have a distro.” I was like, “What!?” I was ordering from Relapse at the time—seven-inches and tapes. Dude, he was the first guy who had black metal demos in his mailorder on the West Coast in those days. So, through him, being at his place, packing mailorders, that was where I first heard a lot of music. Like Burzum, Emperor, Immortal—all the great black metal. Swedish, Greek, Polish, Brazilian. He also had his label, which was Moribund Records, which put out some interesting stuff and some… I won’t judge the taste of it now, that’s not the point, but he offered to put out this tape of this recording. He was into it, I remember, because it sounded like Hellhammer. It was extreme. It was slow, doomy. It was a cool project to work on with him. I don’t know how many were made or how many were sold. I don’t know if that was established for the big story of that recording. Or how it was established and where. Of course, the Southern Lord story is a completely different animal. J U LY 2 0 2 3 : 5 2 : D E C I B E L

Why do you think this record continues to crush people almost 30 years later? GAMMELSÆTER: Perhaps no one followed us

down that path, so it still stands alone in the soundscape? I think the rawness of it—one-take recordings and minimal production—makes it authentic. I have always felt a creation of a power when we play live together; there is an organic type of dynamics, and that comes through on this recording. O’MALLEY: Last year I was listening to the record on my phone with my girlfriend, who was really inspired by that band when she was younger. It’s funny running into people—like something that was so small in the big picture, in the calendar of all of the music I’ve been lucky to be involved with for decades, it just has so much presence in that. Thorr’s Hammer’s the seed that led to so many things. It’s wild. So many things that Greg and I collaborated on together and continue to do. Runhild has been part of some of those projects. It blows my mind when people are like, “That band is really important to me.” But, I mean, we had a woman singing, playing super heavy music. In the ’90s, there weren’t a lot of women in the metal scene in bands for whatever reason. But she was one of them. But I can see now how that was really important to a lot of other women.

PHOTOS BY JAMES ROBINSON

“Thorr’s Hammer’s the seed that led to so many things. It’s wild. So many things that Greg [Anderson] and I collaborated on together and continue to do.”

a woody area near my flat at night, probably Stephen’s and my first venture into black metal aesthetics. We did several shoots and often used my 35mm camera. I still have the shawl and the medallion I’m wearing. ANDERSON: Steve took those photos in the woods, near her university. So, one of the covers is from a show. The China Club show, the one that’s kind of a close-up of her. The other one with the torch was from, I think those photos were taken for Descent. I wish I had those, of him, as well in the woods. But I’m pretty sure he originally intended those to be in his fanzine.

54 : MARCH 2023 : DECIBEL

L O N G M A Y I D R E A M T H E S E

HOW JUSTIN BROADRICK’S EVOLVING ENLIGHTENMENT SHINES IN THE SONIC PURGE OF

GODFLESH STORY BY DANIEL LAKE PHOTOS BY KATJA OGRIN

DECIBEL :

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That goes equally for the against-all-odds reunion records: the primal metallic riffing of 2014’s A World Lit Only by Fire, the hazy-gazey textures of 2017’s Post Self, and this year’s hectic and heinous rebirth, Purge, which revels in a renewal of the driving hip-hop beats that propelled Godflesh’s mid-’90s identity.

METAL HEALTH THROUGH MENTAL HELL

ustin K. Broadrick is no entertainer. That’s not specula-

tion. He told us himself. ¶ “I’m not an entertainer.” That’s Broadrick speaking, early in a multi-segment Zoom session on the evening before he left home to perform at the Inferno Metal Festival in Oslo, Norway back in early April. See? Told you he said it. “I’m here to express the pain I feel, and I don’t take much pleasure in that at all. I just try to communicate that to a fucking sea of human beings. It’s a totally abstract process. People say, ‘You don’t talk! You play 75 minutes, you say thank you at the end, and that’s it.’ Because I’m not an entertainer! I’m not here to ask, ‘Are you guys having a fucking good time?’ That isn’t what this is about. That’s for other bands. This isn’t rock ‘n’ roll. This isn’t that form of communication.” ¶ Nobody with a working pair of ears and a rudimentary knowledge of the past 30-plus years of underground heavy music would think otherwise. From the jump, Godflesh’s 1988 debut EP was a bruising barrage of programmed beats, grinding chords and despondent, reverb-riddled roars. Streetcleaner’s not known for being a barrel of laughs, either, and even the advent of hip-hop beats, dub remixes and higher production values on later ’90s releases never crossed the line into high-spirited, feel-good music.

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Absent any further details, we all assumed Godflesh’s head-splitting tunes were primarily the product of the legendarily oppressive Birmingham industrial environment of the 1970s and ’80s. That is, until Broadrick brought public attention to a very recent diagnosis of autism and PTSD, which our man says shed some welcome light on the previous 50 years of his life. “I started fantasizing songs when I was nine or 10 years old,” he remembers. “When I got my first digital watch—the earliest digital watches you could get had a stopwatch—I used to time imaginary songs. I had an alter ego; I existed through a guy who was a punk rocker, because I was only obsessed with punk rock as a kid. He also, coincidentally, had a number of projects. I spent years making up whole EPs and albums. I’d literally imagine an entire song: great, one minute and 10 seconds, so I can get four more songs on the A-side of this EP. Next one: one minute and 11 seconds. Then I’d write them down the following day. This was my little autistic mind working through all this. “When I first got diagnosed, I said to the Autism Society, ‘But I’m not obsessed with numbers.’ [But then] ‘Oh my god, I spent those years making up songs.’ And that has become my life, but instead of [being] a 10-year-old child lying in bed making them for this other person I’d imagined was my friend for years, I now am that person. I became him. Now I imagine the songs and I make the fucking songs. And I’m obsessed with song durations. The amount of Godflesh songs that are 4:31 is fucking bizarre. The Autism Society said, ‘You’re blessed. Your singular obsession has given you a professional career.’” Broadrick characterizes the effects that autism and PTSD have had on his life as problematic and outright painful, but he describes his long overdue diagnosis as liberation from the neurotypical cage he had spent decades forging for himself, mostly through out-of-control usage of drugs and alcohol laced with heavy doses of depression and negative self-talk. Living with autism has been a daily struggle, but knowing that it’s autism has now provided him with tools to understand and manage those struggles in a far healthier way. “I always thought I just had generalized anxiety disorder [GAD],” he says. “I didn’t realize when you put all this together that it’s autism. I couldn’t fucking believe it. When they went through the [screening] process, they

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diagnosed me super quick. This was a board of eight people, a child psychologist and language therapist, etc. I was in tears with these people. They reduced me to tears with just a couple of reference points. I was breaking down. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to please everyone to make myself feel comfortable; a lifetime not doing things because I’m uncomfortable. Now I’m not masking it so much anymore. [Specialists at] the Autism Society were saying, ‘You’ve got to manage your stress levels. You’ve got to tell people, because they’ll look after you more now that they know.’ And people are helping, like, ‘Right, we can take some stress off your back.’ It’s been good. “I only know a few autistic people. Those I do know, we share a lot of things, and it’s been quite a sense of camaraderie since I’ve met other very autistic people. A lot of them are super young, and they’re like, ‘Wow, what’s it like to be 53 years old and only find out when you’re 52 that you’re autistic?’ A 14-year-old girl, who’s a friend of my son, was diagnosed two years ago. Another is a singer in a band over here called Pupil Slicer—Katie [Davies]; she was diagnosed autistic at 16 years old. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘living a life and finding out so late that’s what you are.’ That’s why I’ve been peddling

this fucking extreme music for this long. I’ve never been able to express this, and I’ve been masking it all the time, and I can’t communicate or function properly, but I can do this. It was always my massive obsession. It was in my blood since I first heard a Stranglers record, which my mom and stepdad were playing when I was 7 years old. I was playing with Star Wars figures and listening to the Stranglers. It’s the weirdest shit. People were saying to me, ‘[At the age] you recorded [Napalm Death’s] Scum, I was still playing with action men.’ I liked the toys, but I was too busy writing a million songs. Clearly extremely obsessional behavior.”

INFINITE FLESH AND IMPURE THOUGHTS Within the metal community, Broadrick’s career is largely synonymous with Godflesh’s mechanical dirges, and the most cantankerous among us have been known to cling solely to the monstrous glory of the aforementioned Streetcleaner. But Godflesh were stone dead for nearly a decade, then reconvened, but didn’t make any new music for half again that long, and the recent six-year lag since Post Self might give the impression that Broadrick’s hyper-focus has dwindled over time. Nothing could be less true. Just a few months

ago, Decibel published a “Top 5 Justin Broadrick Albums” that had been released in 2022 alone, and we had to omit three or four perfectly worthy records just to fit the format. Final, Jesu, Pale Sketcher, Exit Electronics, JK Flesh—all are the brainchildren of the same man, and each project put its name to one or two records in the last calendar year, not to mention all the other years they’ve existed, stretching back through the decades. “I remember reading in one of Brian Eno’s first books,” Broadrick says. “He was talking about working with U2 on Joshua Tree and The Unforgettable Fire, and he was saying how he found Bono’s way of working really interesting: Everything’s usable. Everything you throw in the pot can be used. Eno was pointing out that music is fucking infinite. When I finish a song, I can sit there and go, ‘Fuck, there’s 20 different ways of interpreting this!’ It’s all so open-ended. I can be like, ‘That’s a Godflesh song, but if I pitched that beat down a bit, I could steal it and I’ll have a JK Flesh song. Or that high overdub I did on guitar—if I pitched that all the way down and do all these other functions to it, that could be a Final song. I’m constantly reharvesting. I could pluck any song from this new album and do it 10 times. And each one would be

I ADORE LIFE. IT’S 90 PERCENT TORTUROUS, BUT THAT 10 PERCENT IS BEAUTIFUL, AND THAT’S WHY I’M STILL HERE. WITHOUT THIS MUSIC,

I THINK I’D SEE NO FUCKING POINT WHATSOEVER. JUSTIN BROADRICK

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valid. It’s endless. I could honestly make an album out of one four-minute song, with 50 variations. I’d never get tired of it. I know I run the risk of intense negative criticism with these reinterpretations. There’s always going to be people who are going to be like, ‘What’s the fucking point?’” But fear not, Godflesh lovers with low bullshit thresholds. Broadrick’s threat/promise of perpetual formula-tweaking is an empty one, at least when it comes to the eight concise ditties on Purge… though lead single “Nero” did drop in the company of a remix, a dub version and an “alt version.” The body of Purge proper borrows its identity from none of its predecessors, not even the celebrated 30-year-old follow-up to Streetcleaner, 1992’s Pure. “I almost wish I hadn’t mentioned the Pure thing,” Broadrick grouses good-naturedly about an early flippant remark he made about the ties between that old record and the new. “I’ve already read in a couple of press reports where people ran with that Pure thing, even in the title [similarities], a couple of very tenuous things. Like, oh shit, that wasn’t the point. I hate anything that’s solely revisionist. The whole thing was the concept of reintroducing some pretty destructive hip-hop beats again. Of course, Post Self had this as well, but with these songs, it was to be more pronounced. And there was something about some of the riffs that felt like they had some kinship with some of the songs on Pure, but it’s become misinterpreted. “You could argue that I wrote some of the songs in a similar fashion to the way I constructed Pure: taking a hip-hop beat, fucking with it, mangling it, pitching it down, blending it, making it more harsh and then creating riffs. I’ve always had this obsession with ’90s hip-hop and this minimal, dissonant Godflesh sound. I love that juxtaposition, and I don’t feel anyone else does it. They probably don’t because it’s so flawed, so weird-sounding, so idiosyncratic. This juxtaposition is still relevant enough for me to indulge it. I still feel like there’s a job to be done. It’s been ongoing since Pure. I guess it just wasn’t communicated correctly. There’s no other relationship, really.” Even in light of the way music pours out of Broadrick, thick and ceaseless, there was no guarantee that Purge would ever exist. “After Post Self, I had no ideas I wished to engage with,” he admits. “Probably a year after Post Self, maybe two years, I was like, ‘Maybe I won’t do another Godflesh record.’ I had not fantasized any beats or ideas. Absolutely nothing. One of those COVID nights—of which we had many, obviously, not being able to go anywhere out of choice, which I did enjoy—one night, I just suddenly had half a Godflesh album come to my head. I got riff after riff, beat after beat; it was all fucking there. I remember running over to the studio in the pitch black, 2 a.m. or

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something, and picking up the guitar—an eightstring, I think, [though] there’s only one song with an eight-string and it didn’t even make it to this album—and I just thundered through I don’t know how many songs.”

FOUNDATIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS And when, during this process, does Broadrick bring in his bestial secret weapon, those surly snarling grooves churned out by founding bassist Ben Green? “He comes in at the recording process,” Broadrick says, then stipulates, “Ben’s a real musician. He does not play bass like Godflesh. In the past, when I’d show him basslines, he’d laugh and say, ‘I would not fucking play like that whatsoever, but this is how you play, so this is how we’ll do it.’ The ones I show him are so staccato, and I blunt everything, so he rolls through it and makes it a bit more fluid. He gives it nuance, where I’m just [playing] like a machine. There’s always a song or two, at least, where I’ll have no bass and say, ‘You interpret it how you wish.’ But he always laughs: ‘Yeah, I’m going to play like you play.’ But only he can play my basslines right. He knows exactly how to play that music, spot-on. He can play it better than I play it. Any bassline I’ll show him, when he plays it, I’m like, fuck yeah! He’s a real player. I’m grateful that he’s ever wanted to stick it out and play my shit.” Green clarifies the disparity between his natural musical approach and the way he complements Godflesh’s brute force rhythms: “I would consider myself to be a guitarist primarily, then a bassist, even though my career has been as a bassist. At the time I got my first acoustic guitar, I wanted to play songs by the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, the Monkees, the Hollies—’60s pop music, essentially. My tastes diversified way beyond pop music to heavier progressive stuff like Cream and ELP as well as NWOBHM, punk, jazz, ambient and just about every other genre you can think of. So, Justin and I have different starting points, musically, and Godflesh really requires a more driving, aggressive and percussive approach on the bass than would be my default style.” And for his part, Green can articulate perfectly well why his work with Broadrick continues to resonate with him after so many years. “Justin and I are not and never have been the same person, [but] we have a lot of commonalities regarding music [and] our worldviews. Our general abhorrence at the monstrous injustices humans have always inflicted on each other still impacts on us to this day. We’d both quite happily hide away in a remote forest or cave in order not to have to deal with the horrors of mankind; of course, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s the part that affects us most. Godflesh has always been and will always be a channel to

express these emotions, a way of barking back at the world; and for both of us, music transcends just about every barrier, be it cultural, social, whatever. We do take solace in knowing it touches others out there having to deal with their own horrors. For me, music, sound, tone, whatever you want to call it, is the single most powerful and liberating thing there is, and the whole universe exists through vibrations and waves, music included.” Most of the Godflesh experience can be attributed to its purely sonic qualities, but Godflesh’s lyrical content and structure have always been key elements in conveying the music’s bleak dissent, with the words acting as a cudgeling companion to the downpour of concrete-chunk riffs and shrapnel percussion. “This shit couldn’t be any more abbreviated,” Broadrick says of his truncated in-song poetry. “It intentionally doesn’t have a particular narrative. I don’t tell stories. I only connect with myself and my own observations. It’s a way of reducing my emotional responses and what I suffer, so to speak, through what we know now is my condition. What I’m doing doesn’t need some mouthful of shit. It should be this primitive, primal reduction of language and expression. It’s the bare sinews of emotion, [but] it’s a really complex thing. A lot of people might think, when there’s four lines in a whole song, that it’s written in two seconds, whereas I’m there for ages [trying] to convey it correctly.” As much as every Godflesh lyric has always expressed a corrosive antagonism in opposition to our sadistic, destructive human nature, now the lyrics on Purge can offer more self-aware commentary from Broadrick’s new basis of understanding his own interactions with people in the world. “I’ve always been stuck with childlike emotions, but I think it fuels this music,” he muses. “I think it connects. It’s another reason I use this music in an extremely emotional fashion: because I’m stricken by emotion and anxiety all the time. If the two of them meet, it will then go into ultra-depression. Then I’ve got to get myself out of that. It’s a real uphill battle. “Song four on Purge [“Lazarus Leper”] is a mantra to me: ‘Nothing makes sense.’ A lot of existence does not make sense to me, and I just do not comprehend the human condition. I don’t understand why we’re this flawed, why we’re so fucking horrible. This music is a vehicle for demonstrating how much that shit fucks me up, how much I cannot come to terms with it. To me, creation is a constant flowing river, and I’ll take from it and work at it, but you have to be careful because you can fucking drown. It’s a cheap analogy, but sometimes I do want to drown in it, definitely. I want to immerse myself so much in it that I don’t even feel like this shitty human being anymore. I’m not happy in this skin. A lot of my lyrics are wishing for nullification, wishing for an end.”

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GODFLESH HAS ALWAYS BEEN AND WILL ALWAYS BE A CHANNEL TO EXPRESS THESE EMOTIONS, A WAY OF BARKING BACK AT THE WORLD; AND FOR BOTH OF US,

MUSIC TRANSCENDS JUST ABOUT EVERY BARRIER, BE IT CULTURAL, SOCIAL, WHATEVER. BEN GREEN

He immediately follows this thought with a swift but emphatic amelioration. “But I adore life. It’s 90 percent torturous, but that 10 percent is beautiful, and that’s why I’m still here. Without this music, I think I’d see no fucking point whatsoever. If I didn’t have this as a vehicle, I’d be like, ‘Nah, this isn’t for me, I wasn’t built for this world.’ But I’m blessed that I’ve got a vehicle and some language to communicate this. I often fantasize about this superhuman being, in eight trillion years, when we’ll be this amazing light-being that floats in the sky and doesn’t require this bullshit—we don’t die, we don’t kill. Maybe my spirit will come back then, when we’re superhuman. I’d rather be then. I don’t want to be in this flesh now.”

COLD COMFORT ZONES These days, Broadrick is very selective about booking Godflesh for shows, and he’s better at heeding his instincts when it comes to lengthy touring… specifically, avoiding it. Not that Godflesh were particularly road dogs back in their youthful heyday. “At one point, we were invited on tour with every fucking big band in the ’90s: Soundgarden, Living Colour, Faith No More, Ministry. And I’d be like, ‘I can’t do it.’ People would be like, ‘Why the fuck aren’t you

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doing these fucking tours? Godflesh could have been [huge], but you’ve just said no to everything.’ I can’t live on the road. I’d be dead. It’s no enjoyment for me to live like that.” Green expresses an emergent situation that would be familiar to many like-minded music obsessives who never had rock star egos to feed. “We both really enjoy the creative process of writing and recording songs, with the studio environment being our favorite place. As Godflesh became more successful, touring became a necessity in order to continue being able to be creative and indulgent in the studio. Neither myself nor Justin are particularly keen on touring and playing live. Throughout the ’90s, our hobby became our job. However, the pros outweigh the cons, and we’ve made it as balanced as we can.” Broadrick agrees that he has found balance over time, but it was hard-won, and the specters of past hells haunt every consideration of future touring endeavors. “I don’t know why I put myself through this shit,” he says. “I can’t fly on a fucking plane without [benzodiazepines]. When the band first started, I was so young; I was so drunk and doing bongs all the time that I barely had to engage in any process, apart from getting myself on stage and being a flaming mess. I can’t

travel in vans. I remember the first time I toured America: In three days, I was homesick. I felt like throwing up all the time. I didn’t know I had autism then, but now in retrospect, it’s as clear as daylight what it was. All my predictability and all my confidence had been stripped away. Everybody in all these other bands would sleep in those coffins on the tour bus. I slept three nights in those coffins and I was like, ‘I cannot do this.’ So, I’d be in the back of the bus, rolling around on the seat, which is really fucking dangerous, but it was the only way I could sleep. I just deteriorated day after day after day. I was not washing. I could barely communicate. At the end of Godflesh, I ended up on another fucking tour bus, but the driver wouldn’t let me sleep in the back lounge and I ended up spending most of the tour money on fucking hotels.” After Godflesh’s infamous breakup on the eve of a never-to-be 2002 U.S. run with HALO and High on Fire, Broadrick found a new somber voice in Jesu, but his experience touring that project just spiraled further toward oblivion. “Because it was indulging in melancholy, essentially, it was a really emotional thing to perform, and very upsetting. To be honest, I was really glad when I started performing less as Jesu and more as Godflesh. For me, getting onstage

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and bawling my fucking head off is a brilliant defense. It’s like a mask. Around the mid-tolate 2000s, with Jesu, my alcoholism was so bad, my body was falling apart, I was suffering from dehydration, and my behavior was so selfdestructive that I was like, ‘I’m not touring anymore. I’m finished with this.’ “Ever since that moment, I only do a select amount of shows in little pockets now, and that’s it. [Godflesh are] coming to the States in June and September [2023], just a little clutch of shows, and I was like, ‘Oooh, shit.’ It’s so expensive in the U.S. now, so you’ve got to do a few more shows to make any fucking money. But I’m terrified. I don’t drink like that anymore. Now I use a lot of CBD and a little THC, and it will moderate me.” As much as being away from home tears at Broadrick’s sense of well-being, he admits to the potent upsides of filling a physical space with his music. “Even though I’m saying performance is painful, it’s also transcendental. When it’s right, through the pain of this music and this expression comes transcendence, this moment of white light, almost, where it all falls away: all the pain and the anxiety in the back of my neck, the constant distress that I feel when I’m overwhelmed. [And] I clearly wish for everyone to feel what I feel. I think that’s why my music is overwhelming—I want to overwhelm everyone else. It’s meant to have an extreme impact on people because I’m extremely impacted, so I wish to express this, overshare it, almost. Why? I don’t fucking know.” But the truth is simple: Godflesh’s audience relishes being overwhelmed by something as paradoxically safe as wave after wave of punishing sound. We crave the same transcendence, the same externalization of extreme impact. Seeing the word GODFLESH on a festival poster—built from those stark block letters that appear chiseled out of 10-ton marble monoliths, like a visual shout among the spidery scrawls of other metal band logos—is like getting a subliminal command from the universe itself to buy tickets, make travel plans, submit and obey.

NIGHTMARE LEGACY Green understands it, too. “A big factor in continuing to record and play together,” he says, “is the fact that the music and its ideology [are] still relevant to us, and to listeners. I was surprised, initially, at how many young people were at the shows, or talking to us, not just our own generation. For me, that is a huge validation. And given the times we are living in, the music and lyrics of Godflesh, I feel, are more relevant than ever.” Still, Broadrick demures, almost bristles at the idea that Godflesh can draw crowds. “I still sometimes do not really comprehend the popularity of this music. I meet people and they’re really excited about it, and I’m always like, ‘Is this me experiencing this?’ It feels like I’m back

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there somewhere and here’s the exterior, which is clearly the masking aspect of autism. But I never feel like it’s real. I don’t really feel like people really connect with this. No matter how many times people say it, I can’t believe it. I just think everybody hates this shit.” But the music he makes continues to speak to people, as evidenced by the direct throughline that can be traced from Godflesh to a newer celebrated underground act like Author & Punisher, whose engineer-in-chief Tristan Shone is eager to gush about Broadrick’s impact on Shone’s own artistic trajectory. “I believe the album Selfless got me first,” Shone recalls. “It was a unique album for Godflesh, because the guitar work was more driving, more like metal. It almost sounded like a doom band, like what I wanted to do. It was a little less noisy compared to Streetcleaner. There was something about it that was really heavy, low and thick that I loved. I just listened to that album on repeat. Then I got into their wider catalog. In a time when Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam have all these three minute and 30-second rock tracks, I’m listening to ‘Go Spread Your Wings’ by Godflesh, and all the songs they would put at the end of the albums. Or Melvins would have a 20-minute song and didn’t give a shit. I loved that! I loved that they were taking chances. For me, this type of music was slow and heavy, and you needed to have these lulls, these large crescendos where you’re just building up. There were those moments in Neurosis, Godflesh and Melvins where they really did that, and it was very effective. To see [other] heavy bands from that time try to condense that into this radio play, that just didn’t work for me. [For me] it was about crafting an atmosphere more than creating catchy riffs. That was what was so rad about it.” Inspired by Broadrick’s brash exclusion of a human drummer, Shone also found himself programming beats for a pre-A&P band. “Then they did that dub version of Songs of Love and Hate. My roommates and I were going to New York [City], to raves, so we were starting to get really into dub, drum and bass, and early dubstep. Justin had Techno Animal, and he was really into that stuff. At the same time, you have bands like Limp Bizkit and every other band wanted a DJ onstage with them. That went in the wrong direction, in this way that was pop/EDM rather than underground warehouse culture, soundsystem culture, which is where Godflesh was going. That was exactly what I wanted to do.” Shone continues to reveal that, while he was first making the drone machines instruments during art school, he tended to have Jesu’s selftitled 2004 album playing on repeat. “A couple of tracks were just the heaviest, thickest tone ever, with the drums and the really mellow vocals. Now, I’ve switched over to doing some more mellow vocals on occasion, and this shoegaze doom stuff has been popping up a lot lately,

and I think he deserves a lot of credit. My song ‘Terrorbird’ was directly influenced by [‘Friends Are Evil’]. I’m not going to lie about that. When I was first playing my instrument, ‘Terrorbird’ was the track where everything came together, when I could play my whole system with my left hand doing this and my right hand doing that, and I’m playing this rhythm with my mouth. I was like, ‘That kind of sounds like that Jesu track, but ah, fuck it.’ What am I going to do? They’re my biggest influence, and every once in a while, you rip off your influences. We just toured with Health, and they had an old track that starts like that, too. Whatever. It’s a pulse. What do you want from us? They all start with a pulse and then go different directions.” In 2014, Author & Punisher covered ‘Body Dome Light’ from Selfless for a Godflesh tribute record called Fathers of Our Flesh, and that track is noisy and brilliant. It speaks again to the infinite fractal possibilities that lurk within the apparently rigid Godflesh sound. “I don’t usually speed things up. I usually slow them down, because I need to make them more bluesy and doomy,” Shone says. “But on ‘Body Dome Light’ I was thinking breakcore. I was thinking of doing remixes that way: noisy, clangy, making it more mechanical. That’s how I approached it, and I really distorted the shit out of the vocals. That was probably the only successful remix/redo that I’ve done, outside of the Portishead cover [‘Glorybox’ on Author & Punisher’s 2022 album Krüller].” Broadrick himself reports an extremely close affinity with harsh noise music and recordings of Tibetan singing bowls, saying that immersing himself in all that sound “turns off so much shit” in his brain. He may not strive for the same aural territory as those gelatinous sound fields, but he requires his art to be equally all-encompassing. “When I’m creating something that impacts me, it’s extremely emotional in its content. It has to really move me, at either extreme of emotion—it either has to fill me with complete utter melancholy or feel like brute force or anger or anguish or frustration, when it actually feels like I’m getting fucking strength from it. It’s the age-old catharsis thing, but the thing with catharsis is that it implies an end. I never feel any end to this. I never ever feel like I’ve successfully replicated what I imagined, what I fantasized. I imagine if I ever made that record where I’m like, ‘That’s it! I’ve done it all!’ then what would be the fucking point of doing this anymore? It keeps you alive—and keeps the creation alive—to constantly be chasing this imaginary music. By the time I’ve made it and released it, I’ve convinced myself it is the best shit ever, but six months later I’m like, ‘Nah, you’ve got to dream better than that.’ Long may I dream these nightmares of this music. The music’s a fucking nightmare. Godflesh is a fucking nightmare.”

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INSIDE ≥

68 BOTANIST Plant. Based. 70 DEATHCOLLECTOR Whale tales

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

70 GODFLESH Shout it out loud 72 IMMORTAL Arctic thunder 78 XASTHUR Some more black

Crawling From the Cauldron BELL WITCH

JULY

Seattle funeral doom eulogists pause time with their fourth LP

Ulver COVID variant (original)

Arcturus COVID variant

Borknagar COVID variant

Ulver COVID variant XBB.1.9.1

ccording to the legend’s first written accounts, the Bell Witch was an apparition that haunted a family BELL WITCH between 1817-1821. In the stories, the supernatural entity Future’s Shadow Part I: The poisoned and tormented the subjects of her ire with ghostly Clandestine Gate abilities, including shapeshifting. ¶ The tale has also changed P R O FO U N D LO R E forms over time. Told around campfires, the details distorted across numerous midnight orations. Even apart from oral tradition, the legend has been adapted and mutated and monetized by numerous historians, novelists, screenwriters and the hacks on Ghost Adventures. ¶ Here we are around two centuries after those alleged hauntings, and Seattle funeral doom duo Bell Witch have conjured their fourth LP. Much like Mirror Reaper (2017), Future’s Shadow is a single album-length track that cracks the 80-minute mark. Apart from their collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Bell Witch haven’t drastically changed the ingredients they stir into the cauldron.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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But Future’s Shadow still slowly unfurls to the beat of its own aching, moss-covered heart. Bookended by organs, there’s a haunted aura early in Future’s Shadow. Founder Dylan Desmond’s minimalist riffs reverberate across melted time like smudged illustrations between book chapters. As is customary in the subgenre, Jesse Shreibman’s drumming performance invites contemplation in the silence between strikes. Billy Anderson recorded and mixed the album with as much reverence for quiet as grave-shaking volume. Forty minutes pass before the album’s first growls emerge from a gray haze of bass and keys. On the band’s Facebook page, they describe themselves as “cultivating a sense of time outside of time.” I can glance at my notes on the album and see a minute-by-minute breakdown of each new instrument and chapter. But when a band works more in motifs and movements than verses and choruses, that sort of clinical analysis feels too studious. Bell Witch craft moods and atmospheres more than they forge riffs. As a longform musical expression, Future’s Shadow feels as dense and fragile as heavy fog. The sludgy grooves of their 2011 demo’s “I Wait” or Longing’s “Rows (of Endless Waves)” sound like blast beats at this point. But that’s part of Bell Witch’s commitment to an album experience that removes the listener from the comfy confines of traditional song structures. With their spare instrumentation and ethereal droning, Bell Witch’s funeral doom is the decomposition of pop-rock composition. The result is an album that asks us to press pause on waking life and surrender to its grim pace. Future’s Shadow rewards patient and present listeners with a morose mood poem by artists nearing mastery of their funereal medium. —SEAN FRASIER

ARIDUS

Serpent Moon EISENWALD

New Mexican moon

Cormac McCarthy is a longtime fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, the scientific research incubator and clandestine libertarian think tank. His time there inspired his two recent novels, the brilliant and frustrating The Passenger and Stella Maris. The books wrestle with questions of human morality and the ethics of harnessing nature for our own ends; the nuclear bomb looms large over both volumes. McCarthy’s time in Santa Fe has, paradoxically, shifted his focus away from the depravity of the high desert that he so memorably depicted in Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and others. Serpent Moon, the debut album by Santa Fe’s Aridus, is here to pick up his slack. 6 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

Aridus came into existence when project mastermind Galen Baudhuin (Wolves in the Throne Room, ex-Trap Them) moved back to his native New Mexico after spending years in New England. Baudhuin quickly reconnected with the barren but picturesque desert landscapes of his youth, and he started writing music that spoke to that connection. What came out was the punishing black metal of Serpent Moon. It’s an album that frequently whips up suffocating haboobs of raw, churning riffage; it’s also an album that takes time to reflect on its own desolation, offering generous respites of melancholic acoustic guitar and synth. Baudhuin has clearly learned a thing or two from playing with the Weaver brothers. Serpent Moon renders its high desert just as vividly as Two Hunters does the Cascades. Unlike Wayfarer, whose take on sun-scorched black metal clearly bears the scars of civilization, Aridus prefers to evoke the landscape in its virgin form, with field recordings and jagged guitars that sound cut from desert quartz. Like McCarthy at his best, Baudhuin renders the American Southwest as a place of beautiful terror and terrible beauty. —BRAD SANDERS

ASCENDED DEAD

Evenfall of the Apocalypse 20 BUCK SPIN

Return to (a)scender

Like taking perfectly good veggies and turning them into kimchi, Ascended Dead pervert old-school death metal by fermenting it to a mephitic, near-goregrind consistency. Thankfully, the reverb-sluiced inhale-screams and gravity bombs don’t entirely buff out Evenfall of the Apocalypse’s manifold intricacies, while still assuring that (like a freshly unsealed jar of pickled cabbage) you will clear the room of any and all who don’t have an appreciation for freshlyexcavated fetor when indulged. Ascended Dead are an ensemble of extraordinary musicians who often demonstrate a songwriting acumen that scads of similar outfits simply don’t possess. That said, the band sonically blurs their undeniable capabilities in order to satisfy the ol’ necro shibboleth (with the record’s production arguably acting as their most prominent ID badge). The most immediate casualty of this treatment is bass guitar, which was almost entirely phase-cancelled on one system that I listened on, and is otherwise disagreeably murky on all others. The recording undeniably works to emphasize the album’s furious abandon, but fails to flatter its nuances, as it’s heavily tilted towards a razor-wire midrange and an overreliance on reverb to seal up any outstanding audial crevices.

This is a band that, like Krisiun, perform every track like they’re running late for something. The production—for better or worse—does little to referee Ascended Dead’s hyperkinesis, ergo sonic confusion is inevitable (although, honestly, I’d be unsurprised if this was the point). If you want orchestrated disorder, you’ve got it. For my tastes, the Consuming Impulse-at-2x playback speed of both “Ungodly Death” and “Nexus of the Black Flame,” the mad-dash into harmonic whorls of the title track and the bonkers-yet-successful statement piece “Passage to Eternity” very nearly convince, but I’m lobbying for more sonic detailing next time. —FORREST PITTS

BOTANIST

VIII: Selenotrope PROPHECY

Here comes the bloom

One-man horticulture fanatic Botanist only gained admission into Encyclopedia Metallum off the strength of 2020 effort Photosynthesis, which is hilariously elitist even for them—Otrebor uses a hammered dulcimer instead of guitars, but otherwise I dunno where else you would file this weirdness. It’s admittedly hard to categorize. They list it as “experimental post-black metal,” which is a fancy way of saying “prog.” According to the number at the front of the title, VIII: Selenotrope is his eighth solo album (although V and VII have yet to see the light of day and even his material with other players uses the Botanist name). That’s a while to ignore an artist of this creative caliber. Mostly, this reminds me of Deafheaven with a little more dungeon synth in the mix. Which, cool, I like at least one of those things. Big downside right off the bat: The production leans more towards the dungeon synth side. The drums, especially, feel way too tinny. Once you get past that (and that may not even be a detractor for some folks), there’s an incredibly deep set of emotionally poignant songs crammed into these 40 minutes. It’s hard to tell what Otrebor is shrieking/whispering about, but he means it. I think it’s about plants? It’s lovely, especially in the middle when “Mirabilis” and “Angel’s Trumpet” take you into the heart of the garden. It can be a challenging listen. It’s still worth wandering deep into the shrubbery to find. —JEFF TREPPEL

CLOAK

Black Flame Eternal SEASON OF MIST

Feeling the burn

Atlanta’s Cloak made waves with their 2016 self-titled

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EP, introducing a blackened rock sound that worshipped at the crossroads between Danzig and Venom, and embraced Satanism as a spiritual path as well as a rejection of their southern upbringing. But though the group went on to put out two decent full-lengths and develop a formidable live presence, they never seemed to fully hit their stride; within a style of music rooted in dark mysteries and evil predilections, their offerings sometimes felt surprisingly safe. Shortly after Cloak released their second record, The Burning Dawn, in November 2019, the COVID pandemic sucker-punched the world. Instead of licking their wounds over cancelled tours and missed opportunities, they spent the next year and a half writing before heading back on the road. Cloak’s new third album, Black Flame Eternal, shows their hard work and patience has paid off. The melodicism, grooves and haunting themes are still intact, but as evidenced by the scathing, urgent single “Invictus,” the ferocity has been amped up. The record also reveals some of their most thoughtful songwriting to date. The gothic doom-laced “Eye of the Abyss” trades between gruff, metallic snarls and soft, sweet clean whispers while weaving together arena-sized guitars and celestial atmospheres before the record descends into the crushing blackness of “The Holy Dark,” which sounds like a demonic ceremony held deep below the Earth’s outer core. Cloak have said Black Flame Eternal represents their pursuit of spiritual liberation and individualism in a time where political divisions pressure people to pick sides; whether that message carries over to listeners, they’ve undoubtedly made headways in finding their own voice. —JAMIE LUDWIG

DEATHCOLLECTOR 7 Death’s Toll PROSTHETIC

U.K. death metal veterans love the possessive tense

During the initial days of COVID, when everyone was dusting off their favorite old-school shirts for envious online audiences in an attempt to put a finger in the dike of pervasive boredom, Andrew Whale and Mick Carey not only dusted off their old-school merch, but decided to bust out covers of the bands stretched across their chests. But because two dudes who have creative histories with the likes of Bolt Thrower, Memoriam, Zealot Cult and more wouldn't be content with straight-up recycling, original material was soon embarked upon. The initial result was last year’s Time’s Up EP, followed by forthcoming debut full-length, Death’s Toll. Joined by vocalist Kieran Scott (Ashen Crown, Grimorte) and bassist Lee Cummings 7 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

(Severe Lacerations, Bloodshed), the quartet look to the dusty corners of their closets while keeping an eye out for inspiration from death metal’s fertile lands. You won’t be shocked to learn “Coarse Visions” is a looming combination of the Bolt Thrower/ Sacrilege combo that has enthralled many of today’s illegible logo-loving young ’uns. You might be shocked to learn the song has been molded by the melodic squee of Primordial and early-2000s Enslaved. “Terrorizer” should have been titled “Unleashed.” Or maybe the title track should have? Or maybe “Revel in the Gore”? And there’s no doubt between the four of ’em they own shirts from every U.K. tour Napalm Death has ever done. However, the warm, rehearsal room thunder of Whale’s drums and wall of guitar goo pushing their energetic compositions are somewhat squandered by the ungodly monochrome of Scott’s vocals and whatever he’s drenched it in to shift it from grizzly menace to echoey, growly sputter. Case in point—the melodic thrust, infectious chorus and frantic gallop of the otherwise arresting “A Taste of Ichor” are smothered and covered to gnawing distraction. This could be a minor quibble or deal-breaker depending on your ability to tune things out, but the songwriting is strong enough to warrant giving it a shot regardless. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

DROTT

Troll

BYNORSE

Rundemanen Hunger

Largely improvised instrumental jams between guitarist Arve Isdal (Enslaved, Audrey Horne), drummer Ivar Thormodsæter (Ulver) and cellist Matias Monsen (Sondre Lerche) have evolved into diagrammatic, contemplative structure with Drott. As such, the Bergen-based trio continues its multiplex expedition on their second full-length Troll. More swaths of filmic brush than song-oriented outlay, the follow-up to 2021’s Orcus is truly Nordic Noir. The sparsely populated guest vocals by Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal, Lindy Fay Hella and former Enslaved pal Herbrand Larsen only embolden Drott’s sentiment of sweeping isolation, impending doom and quirky resolution. In many respects, Troll is analogous to Ulver’s Perdition City, but eschews the overt urbanity of tracks like “Hallways of Always” and “Dead City Centres” for georgic, minatory plays on Grieg (“Allting,” “Nattas Blot”), Tool (“Våkenatt”) and the Motorik march of Can (“Det Ser”). Troll—especially the title track—is explicitly representative, at its core, more of Bergen unorthodoxy than Oslo couth. As the 13-song effort traverses the wilds of weirdness, Drott are self-aware enough to not

completely let their creative benefaction crater into mind-altering drone (similar to Kristian Eidnes Andersen, perhaps). “Sabbat,” near the tail end, is a fantastic culmination of everything before it—loud, rhythmic and yet oddly reaffirming. Hella’s vocals have Susanne Sundfør’s emotive reach; that she’s buried smartly in Drott’s “wetcoast” Sturm und Drang jolts less. Certainly, it doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to realize Troll isn’t for black metallers cemented in the purest forms of ’90s nostalgia, but rather those who understood and celebrated the eccentricities of their peers, most of whom are still challenging norms 30 years on. —CHRIS DICK

GELD

Currency // Castration RELAPSE

Loud enough, fast enough

Maybe this isn’t exactly politically correct, but I think it’s okay to question if we have enough short, fast, ugly music. It’s 2023, folks, and there is so much of it out there that no single person can get through it all, and that’s not even factoring in the time it takes to flip over the goddamn 7-inches. But a solid counterargument is Currency // Castration from Geld. While their album title seems straight out of the M. Gira/Swans playbook, these Aussies sound more like a punk band got Toxic Avengered, and they’re desperately trying to get through a set as their flesh is melting off. That still sells them short, though, since this is also thrashy and D-beaty, and there’s phaser pedals and noise and legit blazing solos. By the end, there’s no doubt these guys can play, with even the bass player given the chance to show off his creativity and chops. At times it almost feels as if two bands in two separate practice spaces are accidentally syncing up, and it makes for a great mess. You’d think the vocals are way too charred and venomous to fit with the music, but it just enhances the mayhem and adds acidity to even the catchiest riffs. A record like Currency //Castration may fall flat with both punk haters and punk purists, being too weird or too basic to thrill either camp. But if you still crave more of the short, the fast and the ugly, Geld are doing everything right. —SHANE MEHLING

GODFLESH

Purge

AVA L A N C H E

Outsider music for outsider people

In an exceptionally candid social media post last November, which he has

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GUMM

Slogan Machine CONVULSE

The post-grungecore revolution

One by one | N U C L E A R B L A S T

All right, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Immortal are, once again, back, baby! More importantly, Demonaz is back, and he has many, many riffs to bestow upon us. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Jon, I heard Northern Chaos Gods and it was pretty good, but what if I like Abbath riffs?” Go look somewhere else—seriously. He has multiple solo albums. The adults are talking, and we’re here to discuss Immortal. Did I mention they’re back? Because War Against All definitely demonstrates that. Now, riffs. This album is all riffs—a veritable salad of them, but with a bit more… meat, I guess. And, in classic Demonaz style, they’re all pretty damn good. That being said, War Against All isn’t quite the totally blistering affair that its predecessor was. Featuring

since discussed occasionally, Justin K. Broadrick revealed a recent diagnosis of autism and lifelong PTSD. So now, it’s not just a question of opinion or interpretation to consider Godflesh a cathartic expression of feelings of loneliness, inadequacy and hyper-sensitivity—or “outsider music,” as it has sometimes been labeled throughout the years. It’s a fact, fully admitted by the music’s own creator. Also, now that Broadrick knows what these sounds are in fact a purge for—a respite from his mental health problems (and yes, that is the origin of the album title)—it seems he has gained a newfound clarity and conciseness in the way they are used. After the expansive, fiery outward aggression of A World Lit Only by Fire and the isolated, inner explorations of Post Self, Purge just… is. Admittedly recapturing the more mechanical nature of Pure (“before, we’d always write songs from a guitar or bass riff, but now we often start 7 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

plodding bangers like “Wargod,” Demonaz’s odes to Mighty Ravendark are a palm-muted frenzy, concentrating on crafting more muscular and sinewy songs rather than something purely based in speed. But the sheer malice found on War Against All is what really defines it. Riffs, sure, yes, but Demonaz’s concentration on crafting an evil, malicious atmosphere is key here. Whereas his former counterpart’s heavy/ Teutonic thrash-based bent led the way to a greater sense of “fun” and a different type of energy, this classic and chilling second-wave sound shows a reinvigorated and youthful Demonaz. If you like classic Immortal—and by classic I’m talking Pure Holocaust-era, or even Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism if you want to get old about it—this is the album for you. —JON ROSENTHAL

with a sample as a groove and build from there,” Broadrick explained in a 1991 interview) and enriched with 30 years of technological advancement, Purge rumbles along with the apparently cold indifference, its remorseless, filthy beats augmented by Benny Green’s impossibly cavernous bass, piledriving their way through the monotonously simple riffs Justin surrounds them with. Vocals are used almost as a textural afterthought, short sharp bursts of screamed or flatly sung sentences just reinforcing the bad vibes of it all. However—and here is where Godflesh stand apart from everyone else—in the end, when you add all of these components, the result is anything but numb grayness. Despite the roughness of the ride and the pounding caveman-like simplicity of its methods, Purge will still carve its way into your heart and find a way to connect, musically and emotionally. Genius is an overused term, but for this, it seems just right. —JOSÉ CARLOS SANTOS

HEIMLAND

Forfedrenes Taarer EDGED CIRCLE

Salvaging grimness

Black metallers Heimland are as quotidian as they come. Yet, for what the Norwegians lack in originality, they convince in other areas—such as genre fundamentals. With every requisite box checked wholeheartedly on Forfedrenes Taarer, Heimland freely attack brevity, lay heavy on spirit and focus genuinely on overall production. The group’s debut is only 35 minutes long. When most new black metal offerings bludgeon and blast interminably, Forfedrenes Taarer is over before its parochial unrest weighs too heavily. “Ved Dødens Vugge,” “Skugger fra ein svunnen tid” and the title track are talon-forward attacks of competent variety. Countrymen Djevel, longstanding Swedes Marduk and Polish darlings

IMMORTAL PHOTO BY LEANDER DJØNNE

IMMORTAL, War Against All

Have you ever worked on a project or whatever and someone’s feedback is, “This is definitely headed in the right direction”? Which means it’s not great, but at least it’s a decent start? Well, Gumm are definitely headed in the right direction with their debut LP Slogan Machine. The Tennessee quintet easily falls into the same grunged-up post-hardcore category as bands like Drug Church and Gouge Away, mixing vocalist Drew Waldon’s back alley screams with full-frontal melodies; and when it works, it’s a rewarding blend. “Give You Back Your Youth,” “Crowded Mind” and the title track thread the needle between tough-guy bombast and punk hooks, connecting dissonance to earworms without feeling like left field mash-ups. Unfortunately, those three end up as the only real standouts. Credit to the band for their brevity, but with eight tracks on here, there’s not a lot of room for filler, and most of these songs tend to pull their visceral punches while also struggling to find anything catchy to make up for it. That leaves the record in a frustrating limbo with mid-tempo plodding and pseudo-aggression. There are other standout riffs, but they either can’t carry the song or they’re not given enough of a chance to. This particular subgenre seems to be gaining popularity, with good cause, and Gumm is wellpositioned to take advantage. With Slogan Machine it’s clear they have landed on a sound that works for them. Now all they need to do is make it work better. —SHANE MEHLING

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Mgła offer similar (if of more substantive quality) Satanic, trem-riffed affairs. Heimland’s border-crossing is, however, nominally interesting. Whereas most Norwegians are comforted by self-imposed musical myopia, tracks like “Lagt I Ruiner” and “Ættestupet” possess distinctly Swedish melodic traits, the kind employed to great effect by Dawn and Mörk Gryning. Forfedrenes Taarer benefits from Andreas Fosse Salbu’s (Sepulcher) studio sleight of hand. The production is meaty—mid-fi, in fact—where the bottom end is not only audible, but it actually complements Heimland’s malice-filled riff-scapes. The Unanimated-like groove of “Iskald Raatten Jord” wouldn’t be nearly as potent if Salbu hadn’t energized the lower frequencies in Heimland’s pleasantly unpleasant uproar. Not that we need another band vying for the midriff, but there’s something about Forfedrenes Taarer that edges it ever-so-slightly above its rivals. —CHRIS DICK

LUNAR CHAMBER

Shambhallic Vibrations 20 BUCK SPIN

Cynic for Zoomers

Technical music and I don’t really jive the way we used to, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be convinced otherwise. Take, for instance, Lunar Chamber. Featuring members of Tómarúm, Proliferation and a host of other highly technical bands, the trio (featuring session drummer Kévin Paradis) plays a supremely progressive, excessively technical type of newagey death metal, which, on debut Shamballic Vibrations, to put it bluntly, is fucking great. The songwriting is tight, the musicianship impeccable, and the creativity used within is simply unmatched when it comes to modern technical death metal. There is a lot going on here, be it the weird, spacey atmospheres or the constant barrage of note after note, but it all fits and is incredibly tasteful. Now, I decked this review “Cynic for Zoomers,” which is pretty apt. There’s a lot going on in every single moment on this EP, enough to keep even the shortest of attention spans at high alert throughout its duration. Of course, that also makes Shambhallic Vibrations incredibly oppressive at the same time. Though it’s a highly atmospheric release, often relying on hefty reverb and “bead shop” ambiance to bolster the band’s proficient performances, there is this pedal-to-the-fucking-metal energy to the whole thing that makes the brief runtime all the more welcome. It isn’t bad, but man, you listen to the EP once and need to take a breather. I like to imagine Lunar Chamber treating this release like 74 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

running a marathon, because much like running a marathon, I sure as hell couldn’t play it front to back even if I tried. —JON ROSENTHAL

MAGICK TOUCH

Cakes & Coffins EDGED CIRCLE

Tastykake

Norwegian trio Magick Touch’s previous effort, 2020’s Heads Have Got to Rock ‘n’ Roll, was a perplexing one. It surrounded meaty, aggressive riffs with soaring Bon Jovi-esque choruses stacked with layers. It was more weird than it was terrible. Thankfully, Cakes & Coffins sees the band moving beyond that approach in a significant way. Sort of. Here’s the thing—these guys are savants when it comes to writing hooks and punchy choruses. So, as much as they’ve toned down the multi-vocal harmony histrionics on their latest, they just can’t lay off the sugar. The press kit that accompanies C&C offers the opinion this is a “darker” album that’s “moody,” which is mostly accurate in comparison to its predecessor, but even when they’re singing about “Demons & Rust,” they somehow turn it into an anthem. Minus the lyrical content, the closest musical comparison we can offer is the melodic metal/ hard rock that emerged in the waning years of the NWOBHM when bands like Heavy Pettin noticed that Def Leppard’s lighter approach was actually paying dividends. So, yeah, Magick Touch haven’t lost their mid-’80s hard rock approach, but they’ve at least scuffed up some of the smooth spots. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

METAL CHURCH

Congregation of Annihilation R AT P A K

Sinner’s swing!

Man, when that first Metal Church album landed nearly 40 years ago via a little Seattle-based indie called Ground Zero Records, it was an instant dB Hall of Fame candidate long before such a thing actually existed. Produced by Terry Date, it was an incredibly complete and devastating debut that promised a bright future for the Aberdeen, WA-based quintet. Things didn't exactly work out that way, however, as keeping a steady lineup seemed to be a constant problem. Founder Kurdt Vanderhoof has even flitted in and out of the group over the years (as have a lot of musicians, to be fair). And when original vocalist David Wayne passed in 2005, any possibility of that spectacular debut getting immortalized in the HOF were dashed.

Congregation of Annihilation arrives on the heels of another band tragedy, as on-again-off-again vocalist Mike Howe (Wayne’s successor in 1989) took his own life in 2021. His replacement, Marc Lopes (recently with Ross the Boss), was a canny pick to fill the vacancy, as, like Wayne, he’s equally adept at grabbing the high notes and getting gritty. Basically, he sounds like a Metal Church vocalist. Which is perfect because this sounds like a Metal Church album. OK, that may be a facile statement, but plenty of bands this deep into a career lose the plot in a significant way. With Vanderhoof (the lone original member) at the helm, however, the band’s speedy trad metal is well-preserved without sounding cringingly dated. The riffs are tight and abundant, every song has a clever chorus and Lopes’ energetic/slightly unhinged performance adds spice to all nine tracks. Incredibly, the spirit of the band’s classic debut lives on in Congregation of Annihilation, which is about the best endorsement I can offer. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

PERSEKUTOR

Snow Business BLUES FUNERAL

On with the snow

Masked mutant Vlad the Inhaler (at least, I hope that’s a mask) and his collection of fearsome blizzard beasts crank out some of the scummiest, sleaziest metal filth to come out of the City of Angels—which is saying a lot, considering this is the town that keeps giving Mötley Crüe chances. With members or ex-members of Ides of Gemini, Saviours, Lightning Swords of Death and Huntress on board, it’s an experienced group. And they clearly know their shit. These are dudes who’ve probably worn out multiple copies of Morbid Tales, Black Metal and At the Heart of Winter. Also, weirdly enough (speaking of Mötley Crüe), Too Fast for Love. Their second full-length, Snow Business, doesn’t go quite as hard on the winter theme as its predecessor, Permanent Winter—only seven of the 10 tunes reference the cold in their titles. I like to think that demonstrates growth. It’s overall an improvement over Permanent Winter—the production feels crisper this time around, and the shift towards black ‘n’ roll makes the songs stick around longer than a line of coke at a Stryper afterparty. The lyrics even nod towards social relevancy amidst the usual drugs and murder: “Suck City” references some of the (many) Black victims of police violence across the country. As with a lot of metal with the “blackened” adjective, this can feel a bit one-note at times, even if the Alice in Chains grunge dirges help

SLAMMING TECH DEATH

“Endless Cycle Of Suﬀering is a staggering demonstration of A Pretext To Human Suﬀering’s strength and skill. Ten tracks of mind blowing potency make this one of extreme metal’s nest debut albums in recent times.”

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add some variety. Still, it’s a frosty blast. If chilling is their business… then business is good. —JEFF TREPPEL

POWER TRIP

Live in Seattle 05.28.2018 S O U T H E R N LO R D

Riley Gale forever

Blipping online three months into the pandemic, June 2020, Live in Seattle wove a literally thrashing grace note into the aural matrix that manifested in the face of global isolation. Finally exiled to our individual desert isles, most nests lined sound and vision— and toilet paper. Bandcamp and Netflix became that volleyball named Wilson. Then, on August 24, 2020, Power Trip frontman Riley Gale died from fentanyl intoxication. First summer of COVID-19 blew tumbleweeds here in the Dallas quintet’s home state. See no evil, visit no evil, gather no evil, so every venture out into boarded-up urbanity felt like Escape From New York. For a journalist working a disaster area, interviewing a world-class metal icon just outside the capital felt like discovering the mainland. Driving back that Friday evening, all windows down, Live in Seattle splintering the SUV speakers, this Austinite dissolved into a gulf stream of elation, emotion, grief: tears streaming, manic grin, pounding the steering wheel. In the everloving name of God, Satan, Odin, why Power Trip—a band destined to surpass Pantera as Texas metal’s GOAT? Memorial Day 2018 at grunge-born club Neumos, the Texans threw down, and now three years after digital sentience, the set populates physically. Gale’s black lung exhortation, a hoarse voice of blue-collar loathing—the latenight insecurity and seething bitterness inside of us that will die working—lives again. “Bang. Your. Fucking. Heads,” he commands on PT peak “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe).” Hardcore jackhammer—punk kit Chris Ulsh, bass churn Chris Whetzel, and twin-engine axes Blake Ibanez and Nick Stewart—these 43 minutes seethe, gallop, take wing. Think Slim Pickens straddling Dr. Strangelove. Ride the lightning. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

SMOKEY MIRROR

Smokey Mirror RISE ABOVE

Every supersonic jerkoff

Consider Lee Dorrian the Sir Richard Attenborough 7 6 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

of record label owners. Of course, the former originates from Coventry and the latter from Cambridge, but the grindcore and doom pioneer’s London-based imprint Rise Above continues cloning beasts as primal, gnashing and outof-time as the Academy Award-winning actor/ director’s father of de-extinction in Jurassic Park. Smokey Mirror here join that rampaging strata of Mesozoic metal. Hatched in 2015 in Dallas, the Texan quartet roars out of the gate on its eponymous debut. Double fist bump “Invisible Hand” ignites everything all at once, straight to crescendo, then descends into a maelstrom of pedal-tothe-metal acid rock, all cheap speed tempo and wheelie riffs huffing Monster Magnet vox and Hellacopters on Sub Pop exhaust. Guitar harmonies match the slam dance drum avalanche wherein the whole clatter lurches like a grindhouse car rocket. Said vehicle belongs to Mario Rodriguez, who establishes character on the succeeding “Pathless Forest,” another redline burner of pure gasoline and blacktop. The bandleader’s back-corner yelp scratches the ear just right: raspy, rising to a crack—tart. Everything about Smokey Mirror smacks of long hair and Les Pauls, beer and bongs, biker bars and cleavage. Vocal effects can sodden the nitro boogie (“Magick Circle”), but there’s no gutting “AlphaState Dissociative Trance,” which flashes back to the guit-terrorism of 1990s instro magi Satriani, Vai and Chris Polland. Long cut “Sacrificial Altar” drops napalm wah-wah, while “A Thousand Days in the Desert” upshifts into an Aussie punk accelerant straight outta Radio Birdman. Penultimate “Who’s to Say” feigns a comedown only to incur Rodriguez’s secondbest vocal delivery, which dusts the proceedings like the 1960s revolution weaponizing and winning. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

SPECTRAL LORE

11 Days

SELF-RELEASED

Stare into the abyss

Greek antifascist black metal project Spectral Lore have quietly released a new protest EP dedicated to the over 25,000 migrants and refugees who drowned while trying to reach safer shores, victims of the European Union’s harsh immigration policies. 11 Days is a four-song EP whose short tracklist belies its cinematic 44-minute scope. While the overall message is political, the songs themselves are more fluid, interwoven with nods to the supernatural and references to African mythology.

The tracks alternate between the band’s more characteristic atmospheric, progressive, synth-washed black metal and purely ambient instrumentals; each has their own character, but the four naturally flow into one another. The hypnotic opener “Moloch” swirls and surges like a riptide, and plunges directly into the EP’s theme with sparse, poetic lyrics that describe a harrowing voyage across the Mediterranean. “I must overcome it / I must hold to this scrap of rusted metal and not let go / for 11 Days,” Ayloss gasps, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the crashing waves, dilapidated boats and ugly guard towers that so often accompany those desperate journeys. “Fortitude/Sunrise” follows, and its pulsing tones, breathy scraps of voice and alien textures may as well be field recordings from the bottom of the ocean—or the soundtrack to a shipwreck. “Adro Onzi,” named for the Lugbara god of death, pays blackened tribute to those who didn’t make it, their bodies buried “a thousand leagues into the depths.” It’s the EP’s most straightforward song, a classically icy, frenzied piece of black metal anchored by somniferous riffs and Ayloss’ sepulchral roar (there’s also a killer solo). “Tremor/Kalunga Line” brings the EP to a close with the sound of crashing waves and undulating synth; if you listen closely, the voices of the dead seem to echo out from the other side of the Kalunga line—the threshold between worlds, an aquatic graveyard of innocents. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. —KIM KELLY

SUFFERING QUOTA 8 Collide

TA R TA R U S

Hitting their numbers

There are different degrees of awesome, and despite what the dictionary of the day claims, not all of them have to refer to definitive mind-bending, world-changing sensations. Example—winning the lottery will never not be awesome. But it’s definitely more awesome to win the Powerball when the payout hits newsworthy totals than it is to win a comparatively piddly cool million, which is still more awesome than winning a couple hundred bucks on a scratchy. And it’s definitely far more awesome to win the lottery in Canada, where the winnings aren’t at all touched and taxed like in the U.S. To these ears, Collide, the third album by Dutch grindcore quartet Suffering Quota, is pretty awesome. It peals along like a band that formed in the muddy aftermath of a pig pile-on during back-to-back-to-back Yacøpsæ/Rotten Sound/

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Wormrot sets at Obscene Extreme—where the tutus are optional but encouraged. It may not squeeze out that final bit of unique panache to elevate the band to king status. But it’s still really good, if not awesome. Rookies and normies may not hear the broad range of grind, crust, mild mathematics, hardcore and Agathocles mincing in Suffering Quota’s terse and direct compositions, as they generally blaze along with the subtlety of suburban street racers at 3 a.m. on a Friday. “Out” dances and parries like classic Dillinger on a Dropdead bender, drummer Martin Kah combines grindcore blasting with the fun of punchy drumline work on “Rights,” whereas “Grow” sees guitarist René Beukers flicking his wrist like Discordance Axis’ Rob Marton to create that melodic hummingbird covered in gritty urban filth feel. Other shock-and-awe tactics—various halftime mosh parts and musclehead vocal staccato—will seem familiar, but are thankfully awesomely effective. And with a compact 12 songs blasted off in 19 minutes, Collide makes a concise statement that’s as much awesome blunt force object as it is awesome thinking person’s noise manifesto. Awesome stuff. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

THANTIFAXATH

Hive Mind Narcosis DARK DESCENT

Mass hypnosis

Black metal either subscribes to the Great Man Theory of History (under which it is shaped by firebrand rent-a-quote bomb-throwers) or to a more hermetic sensibility that requires the art form to be performed in perfect anonymity, the music left to do all the talking, lest the suggestion of an earthly hand in its design diminish the magic. Or worse, explain it all away. Thantifaxath are of the latter stripe. Live, you’d find them secreted under hoods. Elsewhere they’ve written themselves out of their own story. There’s freedom in that, for band and audience alike. Thantifaxath use it to forge an iconoclastic style of fitful blasts, hostile sharp edges, yowling doom and atonal noise, with the mere suggestion of ecstatic melody through the storm. Hive Mind Narcosis is a lot for the ear to digest, but it rewards adventurous appetites and palates matured on the recorded works of Deathspell Omega, Imperial Triumphant and others who similarly contort black metal into new shapes and sounds. This, moreso than Thantifaxath’s stellar 2015 debut, Sacred White Noise, is all 7 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

surprises; it’s more audacious. Tracks such as “Burning Kingdom of Now” are propelled by anti-rhythm, a beat at war with itself. Those listening on CD might be tempted to check for scratches. “Blissful Self Disassembly” is a masterly bait-and-switch—half sci-fi synth, ethereal and purgatorial; half drones and the elastic snap of tension pulling you back earthwards to the sputtering chainsaw riff of “Mind of the Sun,” a funhouse bad trip to bring a bewildering and bewitching recording to a chaotic, pummeling climax. So what if all we know about them is that they’re from Toronto? —JONATHAN HORSLEY

THY CATAFALQUE

Alföld

SEASON OF MIST

Keeping it weird by not being weird

After 25 years of poking metal’s arcane and oddball corners—and sometimes not even being very metal at all—Tamás Kátai, the mastermind behind Hungary’s Thy Catafalque, has issued the following mission statement for his 11th album: “Alföld is the most straightforward and classic extreme metal album the project ever recorded. This time I just wanted to do metal without any innovation or progression, focusing on songs and riffs rather than experimenting and breaking new grounds. Had to let the old ideas out, so I did it with enjoyment.” Basically, when you’ve done it all (and it goes over most heads), sometimes the only way to go is backwards (and clock the general public upside their heads). Though after this amount of time in the transformation game, Kátai’s idea of regression is still steeped in forward movement and all the layers, multifaceted influences and left-of-center sonics that come with it. What should be noted about Alföld is, while it starts with a tribute to mid-paced crawling and a stripped-down Celestial Season sensibility in “A csend hegyei,” by the time the album’s penultimate space case “Szíriusz” rolls around, Kátai and his gang of contributing freakazoids have taken various stabs at everything gothic, eccentric, elegant and aristocratic—with plenty of baroquely European takes on classic Metallica instrumentals—before ending the whole thing with “Néma vermek” and its spot-on imitation of Dimension Hatröss accented with Gene Roddenberry theremin whirls. Other highlights include “Folyondár” dragging Orphaned Land’s rhythmic mystique into the ’70s with some Blood Ceremony olde-tyme flute-blowing and Brand X-type jazz fusion, and “A földdel egyenlo,” which sounds like a

dumbed-down Confessor hooking up with a smartened-up Mayhem, a comparison I realize may sound like an insult, but honestly isn’t! —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

XASTHUR

Inevitably Dark LU P U S LO U N G E

It was only a matter of time

Scott Conner has had one of the strangest music trajectories in black metal history. The artist formerly known as Malefic was a major player in the depressive black metal wave that defined USBM in the early 2000s, but after releasing several landmark albums, declared that he had tired of the genre in 2010 and pivoted to… bluegrass. Twenty-four years after Xasthur began, Conner’s erstwhile identity as black metal misanthrope doesn’t fit him anymore; nor does his more recent gloom folk persona, which saw him through a few years of Nocturnal Poisoning, but ultimately seemed to be too limiting. Now, Xasthur is back with a new double album, and while Connor himself may have held onto his curmudgeonly outlook, Inevitably Dark is the sound of a lifelong musician who’s grown tired of being shoved into marketing-approved genre boxes and decided to fully let loose. Its 23 (!) tracks slither and sprawl between a smattering of genres, from the folk and dark ambient strains one might expect to spooky dungeon synth (“Benefits of Dying”) to discordant scraps of jazz (“Worse Than the Good Old Days”) and—wait for it—black metal. The press materials grudgingly admit that the band “have partly lifted the self-imposed ban on black metal, simply because Conner felt like it and therefore did it,” which has a bit of a “the lady doth protest too much” vibe, but as a former Telepathic With the Deceased fangirl, I’m not complaining. The resulting semi-return to form yields compositions like “HellRot,” with its fuzzed-out black/death metal churn, “Stigmatized Grave”’s refined melodic plodding and the clattering, synth-soaked album closer “Projection of Inferiority II.” It’s exciting to hear Conner go dark again, but ironically, the album’s strongest moments come during tracks like “Psychiatric Masochist” and “Trauma Fiends,” synth-dappled instrumentals anchored by genuinely lovely folk melodies. You can tell where his heart really is here, and if this album was a grand experiment, the results are obvious: Scott Conner isn’t finished with black metal after all, but it seems like black metal might be finished with him. —KIM KELLY

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EUGENE S. ROBINSON

DREAMS OF

JUSTIN BROADRICK the

Supersonic Festival

in Birmingham, England is the shit. Jenny Moore and Lisa Meyer, who originally started it, first booked it in some old strip club. Or was it a pub? Don’t remember, but the point is, after many years—nay, decades—it’s now a firmly established institution in the home of Black Sabbath. One of the best things they had as part of their either official or unofficial policy was never saying “no” to any idea. No matter how batshit crazy. If memory serves, they were not in the slightest bit opposed to even suggesting such themselves. The year in question is hazy (let’s say maybe 2007), but the terms were not: Why don’t you and Niko Wenner from Oxbow do a show with Justin Broadrick, Stephen O’Malley, Dave Cochrane and Charlotte “Chipper” Nicholls? Broadrick, with his time in Godflesh, Napalm Death, Techno Animal and Jesu; O’Malley from Sunn O))); Cochrane formerly in that band GOD and Head of David; and Nicholls on cello would make a hell of a stew, and so the answer 8 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 3 : D E C I B E L

was always and forever going to be yes. The plan was to record and release a festival specialty item. Which they did and it was. The song was called “You Pay First,” and the directions as delivered by Wenner were scant, but amounted to always truing it up to a certain key. Outside of that? Anything went. “You say something about my tits?” Nicholls, who at the time had been with Crippled Black Phoenix and pretty soon after that with Portishead, had clearly misheard me. “I said, ‘Is this where you’re going to sit?’” I stated. She seemed unconvinced. And even more so when she saw me look at the tits she had just referenced. Which is par for the course. You tell me to not look at that elephant, I’m looking at that elephant. It’s the way of the world. Or at least my world. The show grooved for the entire side of the later-released record. I remember riding a monitor wedge in my underwear. Some would say I had my penis in my hand. I would not. Since my mother reads Decibel and doesn’t need to read that. Post-show, the stage was rushed by all and sundry, people drawn to

the musicians that they were most drawn to. Broadrick and O’Malley got the lion’s share, but standing off to the side I recognized “my people”: physically imposing, but nervous-looking as fuck. And with a certain air of intensity. I get dressed while the band is gathering up their gear. I’m watching Broadrick and make him for a brother-in-arms, at least regarding being on the spectrum. In other words, we talk, but we don’t really like talking that much. “Do you mind if we get a picture?” The large man is dressed all in grays and blacks, and I nod. “But a special picture.” He says this last part haltingly. “Oh?” “Yeah. Could you choke me for the picture?” I do not have to be asked twice. His equally nervous-looking friend, camera at the ready, stands poised to capture for posterity this grand moment. But when I go to slap what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu cats call a rear naked choke, he snaps his head back. I respond by jerking my head back to avoid the blow. The force of me jerking my head

back pulls us both over, and while crashing to the floor, the back of my head hits the security fence and I am paralyzed. I can see and hear. But I can’t move or speak. Niko walks to the edge of the stage, looks down at me, shrugs and goes back to doing what he’s doing. He denies this later, of course. But so would I if I were him. So, I look to Broadrick and O’Malley, but they’re pros and have long gone. The guy who now was on top of me picks me up and takes me to the bar. I finally ask as he buys me a drink and I can stand, “What happened out there?” “Oh man, I’m sorry. I got nervous. And you surprised me.” I put my drink down, punched him in the guts and dropped him. “Well, let’s call it even now.” He laughed, we laughed, drinks were finished and I don’t believe I saw Broadrick again until we played with Jesu in Texas. That was the show where someone thought it would be funny to call me Buckwheat. Someone I could see in the fifth row. But another story for another time. ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE