Decibel #236 - June 2024 by Red Flag Media

1975 2024

KERRY KING RAISING HELL

REFUSE/RESIST

UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS PALLBEARER NOCTURNUS AD JOHN CARPENTER KNOCKED LOOSE VASTUM TERMINAL NATION TZOMPANTLI

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JUNE 2024 // No. 236

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June 2024 [R 236] decibelmagazine.com

upfront

features

14 obituary:

blake harrison And it’s hard for me to say

16 metal muthas Hammers of Ms. Fortune 18 low culture Put that on a shirt 19 kill screen:

john carpenter Time to kill

20 knocked loose Sunday worst

30 nocturnus ad The never-ending story

22 terminal nation They saw the Devil

32 uncle acid &

the deadbeats Killing at the box office

24 funeral leech Time after time

34 pallbearer Opening up

26 tzompantli To the beat of their own drum

reviews 36 q&a: kerry king Slayer may be back from their hiatus, but the King never took a break from his own Hell 40 the decibel

While others were quick to grow up, Exhumed stayed true to their guts on debut LP Gore Metal

28 horndal The hammer and the anvil

hall of fame

65 lead review Gatecreeper’s new LP Dark Superstition has hooks that are clearly sharpened to kill 66 album reviews Records from bands that will never look at onion rings in same way, including Deicide, Full of Hell and Unleash the Archers 80 damage ink Life and times

CRYPT SERMON Coming Up Roses COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY SCOTT KINKADE

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $34.95. 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. © 2024 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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a Carcass show in September 2008. It was appropriately at the old Sonar in Baltimore—a now legendary venue with a truly salacious history that I’d spend significant time with Blake at over the next several years. I mentioned the encounter in the following issue’s editor’s notes, writing “the new brainteaser is trying to determine how many drinks Pig Destroyer’s Blake Harrison has imbibed before I arrived at 7:00 p.m.” A few days after the issue’s publication, I received an email from someone referring to themselves as “The Party Boat” containing the following message: “Two. It was two drinks.” Over the next 16 years—with a few trips aboard the party boat—I got to know Blake well. The convivial reputation that preceded him was no doubt earned; I could easily fill the rest of this magazine with hilarious Blake stories, though several of them would likely need to be redacted. Of course, most people knew how quick he was to share music he loved—and even some he didn’t, often via his long-running For Those About to Squawk column. (I’m sure he’d be horrified by the multiple positive Napalm Records album reviews in this issue.) But there were sides to him rarely seen by the casual metal fan. He was almost universally friendly and accommodating to the admirers of his many musical projects—and he possessed the enviable skill to systematically turn a would-be punisher into the punishee. The warmness that belied his scratchy two-packs-an-hour voice extended far beyond his beloved underground music community. Sure, he loved to “talk shop,” but he was just as likely to call or text you to check in as a friend. He loved kids and was always quick to engage and entertain mine. Whether hyping a crowd of thousands or teasing my daughter about eating her pizza, dude was a gifted showman in virtually any setting. Blake’s memorial service was thoughtfully held at Baltimore Soundstage, another renowned venue I’d spent countless hours at with Blake. Surrounded by dozens of mutual friends, nearly all of whom were gifted similar experiences inside that room, was perhaps the best way to process our collective grief. Almost all of us will set foot in there again to see a show sometime soon, a place filled with souvenirs of the hugs, laughs and not insignificant shit-talking he elicited. Not that we really need any reminders. No one is ever going to forget Blake Harrison. Love you, you rascal. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

REFUSE/RESIST

June 2024 [T236]

I first met Blake Harrison outside of PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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James Lewis

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Anthony Bartkewicz Emily Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Dillon Collins Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Addison Herron-Wheeler Jonathan Horsley Neill Jameson Kim Kelly Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Jamie Ludwig Shane Mehling Tim Mudd Justin M. Norton Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt 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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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 $34.95. 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 ©2024 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

Jonathan Meyer Montclair, NJ

You were a Reader of the Month 17 years ago, back in issue No. 36. What’s the biggest difference in your life today compared to your life then?

Undoubtedly, becoming a husband and father has been the biggest difference. Teaching is a breeze compared to both. Marriage and fatherhood compelled me to reach out into the ether in search of musicians who could identify with both. Alas, I found three metalheads and we formed a daddoomcore band called Negative Bliss, which provides us with camaraderie and catharsis for our mental health. Metal has always saved me.

12 : J U N E 2 0 2 4 : D E C I B E L

In issue No. 36, you gave us grief about not putting the Red Chord on the cover. Now 200 issues later, there is still no Red Chord cover, but we did get them to reform! In a reprise of the original question, who deserves a Decibel cover that hasn’t already graced it?

I know post-metal is so passe, but Cult of Luna. Not many bands have their longevity while still pushing into new territory, yet being instantly identifiable. I could easily recommend three of their albums for Hall of Fame induction (ahem). Exhumed’s Gore Metal is this issue’s Hall of Fame inductee. Would you have given that one the nod 17 years ago, or do you think that it required nearly two decades of pre-induction putrefaction?

This is a question where I will plead ignorance. I listened to Exhumed years ago when I received the Relapse mailorder catalog and was

instantaneously drawn to their artwork. Knowing their extremity and lyrical bent, I'd argue 17 years is plenty of time for the rot to settle in, creating quite the putrefied stench.

At almost 43 years old, Decibel has been one of my longest friendships. It never turned its back on me. I can’t imagine not being with you in perpetuity. It’s been exactly 200 issues since the last time you were Reader of the Month. Should I pencil you in now for issue No. 436?

At almost 43 years old, Decibel has been one of my longest friendships. It never turned its back on me. I can’t imagine not being with you in perpetuity. My greatest parenting feat has been raising my 7-year-old son, a metalhead. If I am somehow not here due to some kvlt death, he will be a loyal subscriber. Book it.

ChuckBB.com / Instagram: @chuckbb_art

OBITUARIES

THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF

BLAKE1 9 7HARRISON 5- 2 0 2 4 BY JUSTIN M. NORTON

1144 :: JJU UN NEE 22002241 :: DDEECCIIBBEELL

hen Pig Destroyer played the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in July 2009,

Blake Harrison did something different: He brought an angle grinder on stage. Angle grinders shape and grind metal and are not typically—if ever—used during concerts. As fans drank free cheap scotch in an unventilated 115-degree building, sparks flew everywhere, creating a scene from the Japanese industrial horror film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. “We didn’t do it in practice because we couldn’t do it in my house,” says Pig Destroyer guitarist Scott Hull. “J.R. [Hayes] and I were shocked to get showered with debris. It was unforgettable.” ¶ The angle grinder still sits in Pig Destroyer’s practice space. And that night in Brooklyn 15 years ago perfectly encapsulates Harrison’s wonderful, playful and unpredictable life. Harrison, Pig Destroyer’s sound engineer and a renaissance man of extreme music, loved making an impression. He was one of extreme music’s perennial ambassadors, whether mentoring a young band like Noisem, talking about a band he heard on social media, educating friends on classic ’80s hardcore or reviewing albums in his bi-weekly Decibel column For Those About to Squawk. “All of us loved Blake dearly and invented a spot for him to be in the band full-time,” Hull says. “He was very positive and always there for younger bands, even sometimes if he didn’t like them.”

Harrison, who died at 48 on March 9 from complications after a long cancer fight, was extreme music’s model citizen. The genre prizes three things: innovation, fearlessness and community. These values informed every aspect of Harrison’s life. Harrison pioneered noise and soundscapes in grindcore music, starting with Phantom Limb in 2007, opening the genre to novel sounds and creative approaches. He was hilariously irreverent; his parrot-fronted death metal band Hatebeak was featured on The Howard Stern Show. He tirelessly worked to build the extreme music scene, whether through granting interviews, booking shows or connecting people. That spirit was the first thing friends and fans recalled when he passed. Harrison also deeply loved his rescue pit bull Crab, Guinness Stout, the Angry Samoans, Dead Boys and longtime partner Lindsey Turnbull. Mark Sloan, Harrison’s cowriter in Hatebeak, says Harrison was a fount of ideas, and even considered forming a golf-themed metal band named In the Rough. “He was unstoppable with his enthusiasm,” Sloan says. “He loved people as much as he loved extreme music. We did Hatebeak because we had access to this bird and figured we would do it for our enjoyment. Hatebeak accomplished way more than we set out to do, and there was a real love for heavy music behind it.” Tony Pence, owner of Baltimore’s Celebrated Summer Records, met Harrison in 1996; the pair soon formed the powerviolence band Daybreak. He says Harrison was always the “funniest and wildest person in any room,” and was in his store PHOTO BY SHANE GARDNER

Turnbull and Harrison were friends before they started dating, and she knew of his eclectic music taste. She handed over the paper if they went to trivia night and music came up. “He loved the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain and arty bands and noise stuff,” Turnbull explains. “His sense of humor was so off the wall, but it was funny because it came out of his mouth. He did stuff the way he wanted to do it. He was also a compassionate person. He had a gruff way of talking, but there are millions of stories online about how well he treated people. People will remember him because of the music, but I hope he is also remembered as an incredibly thoughtful and compassionate person.”

He did stuff the way he wanted to do it. He was also a compassionate person. He had a gruff way of talking, but there are days before his death, making people laugh. “His enthusiasm for making friends and his excitement millions of stories for all kinds of music was infectious and no doubt online about how well the reason Pig Destroyer brought him on board,” Pence adds. “He was very quick to make friends he treated people. and charm folks. He was truly one of a kind.” People will remember him “Blake was always the ambassador of ‘you are going to love this, check it out,’” says Jason because of the music, Hamacher, Harrison’s bandmate and drummer in the hardcore passion project Zealot R.I.P. “He introduced me to all kinds of bands I had never heard of. He even introduced me to artists for my gallery, and we did shows with some of them.” Harrison was also indefatigable; even after dealing with chronic illness, he considered new projects and planned more shows with Zealot R.I.P. “One of the things I always liked about hanging out was we are very similar, but have different outlooks,” Hamacher continues. “I’m an eternal optimist and he was an opinionated cynic. I’m a massive [Slayer] Seasons in the Abyss fan. Blake would just say the record is terrible. He was quick not to dismiss your take, but also tell you he thought the selection sucked.” Harrison’s artistry and whimsy even extended to his personal life. Turnbull once dragged Harrison to a professional networking event. She left him alone for a time and later found him telling a highly questionable story that involved the term “corpsefucker.” “I wasn’t even that mad about it,” Turnbull says, laughing. “He was just very passionate about the things he was passionate about. He loved being onstage and the catharsis and energy between him, the audience and everyone onstage.”

but I hope he is also remembered as an incredibly thoughtful and compassionate person. LINDSEY TURNBULL

“He gave joy to a lot of people and was a funny person and a great person to be around,” Hull says. “Even if you only met him once, you would know and remember him. If anyone remembers someone in this band, it’s Blake because he was so outgoing. He was the life of the party. He was our spirit animal.” D E C I B E L : J U N E 2 0 2 4 : 15

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month? Well, here are the records that we spun most while claiming Aladdin Sarsippius Sulemenagic Jackson III as a dependent when filing our 2023 taxes.

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

This Month’s Mutha: Kathy Young Mutha of Leila Abdul-Rauf of Vastum

Tell us a little about yourself.

Growing up in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s, I was exposed to all kinds of pop music on the many radio stations that broadcast in the city, like WABC and WMCA for Top 40 and the soul station, WWRL. My best music memories are of singing doo-wop, soul and R&B with neighborhood kids in the ethnically diverse streets of upper Manhattan. Although my dreams of becoming a professional singer did not materialize (I’m a retired assistant principal), I am happy and proud that my daughter Leila chose a career in music, which gives me a little bit of vicarious pleasure, although it hasn’t all been vicarious: I was thrilled to provide vocals (and get credit!) for Leila’s song “Pull” on her album Insomnia. Leila was in her high school marching band. What were some of her other interests at the time?

Leila was (and to this day remains) an avid reader. She was studious, self-motivated and excelled in school. Having learned French while living in Malaysia in the fifth grade, Leila was so advanced in that subject that, by the time she got to high school, she had completed all her foreign language requirements. During Leila’s high school years, she collected so many cassette tapes and CDs of musical artists (whom I had never heard of) that the collection seems to have filled half the space in our large basement. How do you think growing up in New Jersey shaped your daughter as a person and artist?

First, the music program in the Tenafly, New Jersey public school system was top-notch. Leila’s

love of music, musicology and music composition was nurtured, encouraged and enhanced by her deeply dedicated music teachers. Also, our home’s proximity to Manhattan—and easy access by public transit—allowed Leila to make many trips to music venues in the City like Irving Plaza, ABC No Rio, CBGB and Bowery Ballroom, all of which added to and likely informed the music that Leila creates today. Leila has said Vastum’s lyrics deal with “body horror and eroticism through a psychoanalytic lens.” Did you have anything to do with her interest in transgressive art?

Not at all! Where that comes from is still a mystery to me. Be it Vastum, Hammers of Misfortune, Amber Asylum or her many other projects, what is your favorite and why?

I like them all, but the music of Hammers is closest to my taste, perhaps because, to my ears, it is more harmonic and melodic. Remember, I’m a child of the 1950s and ’60s. What’s something about Leila that most of her fans would never suspect?

Leila has a Master’s Degree in Audiology and Speech Sciences from Purdue University with a specialty in child language acquisition skills. And she is unbeatable at Simon, the electronic memory game where you have to remember the flashing light sequences and repeat them correctly. Nobody in the family can beat her.

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Crypt Sermon, The Stygian Rose  Gatecreeper, Dark Superstition  Tzompantli, Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force  Pallbearer, Mind Burns Alive  Will Haven, El Diablo ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Death, Spiritual Healing  Entombed, Left Hand Path  The Exploited, The Massacre  Samhain, Final Descent  Obituary, Cause of Death ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Crypt Sermon, The Ruins of Fading Light  Exhumed, Gore Metal  Tzompantli, Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force  Funeral Leech, The Illusion of Time  John Carpenter, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Crypt Sermon, The Stygian Rose  Terminal Nation, Echoes of the Devil’s Den  John Carpenter, Lost Themes  Full of Hell, Coagulated Bliss  ACxDC, G.O.A.T. ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Necrot, Lifeless Birth  Exhorder, Defectum Omnium  Fright, Cesspool  Vulgar Devils, Witches Wheel  Child Abuse, Child Abuse

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Infernal Moonlight Apparition : devil master

 My Dying Bride, As the Flower Withers  Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas  Quest Master, Sword & Circuitry  Balmora, With Thorns of Glass and Petals of Grief  Obsidian Gate, The Nightspectral Voyage

—ANDREW BONAZELLI PHOTO BY

16 : J U N E 2 0 2 4 : D E C I B E L

A.J. KINNEY

The Last of Us Part II [NAUGHTY DOG/SONY INTERACTIVE]

FOR MASTER OF HORROR

Hallo There… How’s Life? bout a week ago, I started therapy.

Because our local healthcare system is rad (yours, too, I’d wager), I got set up with a social worker via Zoom, which is not how I envisioned the whole thing to go. I’ve tried it once before, way back in 2016 when I worked for the state and had great healthcare, so I was able to get a real psychologist. And you know what she said after I gave her the rundown of my life? She said, “Holy shit.” Anyway, that didn’t work out. Maybe this one will? She didn’t seem fazed by any of my trauma, so I think we might be golden here. A lot of what I write seems to swing from bitching about the people in the industry to some kind of soliloquy of whatever horseshit is galloping through my head to more serious topics like mental health and my experience with it. The first two approaches regularly elicit notes that my column “gets dumber every month,” which I can’t disagree with, but that third one evokes a lot of messages asking for advice on how to deal with having rotten brain chemistry. Unlike the other messages, I do my best not to ignore these, but it can be difficult since one of my coping mechanisms is to not open emails, or to take forever to respond. It makes me look like a dick—which the internet has led me to believe that nearly everything I do does—and I’m learning that conversations left one-sided can be excruciating when the person who reached out isn’t there anymore. But I’m not the person to give advice on any of this. I’ve been struggling with it since I was formally diagnosed in 2002. I’ve been on a baker’s dozen of different drugs, not to mention any self-medicating I’ve done. I’ve tried several different treatments, including a suicide attempt— I figured that would “cure” me—and I’ll probably try more before I jump ship and fly with the space whales or whatever asinine process occurs 18 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

when you die. So, yeah, not I’m not exactly Ann Landers (ask your parents), but I will do my best to listen and offer support. Because I know how it feels to need to lean on people—I still do and probably always will. Mental illness in any form—be it depression, anxiety, paranoia, anger, only being able to cum while making eye contact with a beloved family pet—is nothing to feel ashamed about. But it’s also not a cottage industry to be celebrated or a personality trait. I’m sure you’ve seen people share Tinder profiles where whoever their fuck target is has five paragraphs proudly stating they’re mentally ill the same way someone in a fedora will proclaim they’re an IPA enthusiast. These people are vampires. Are they mentally ill? Probably, but not in the way they’re presenting. I’m sure if I typed “mental illness” into an Etsy search, I’d be bombarded with swag for every possible diagnosis. These vultures represent an unwillingness to try to get help because that means they’ll have to think of some other arts and crafts to print on demand to swindle dolts out of their money. That might have been a little harsh; I bought a very nice bullet belt off Etsy. Free shipping, too. My point, if I even have one, is that we’re staring down the remainder of what will be a very hard year for anyone not selling red hats, with all of the noise that bellows into our lives through the social media we’re addicted to (I’m no different), and the media constantly using tactics like “Where In America Is Best to Live During Putin’s Nuclear War” (that’s a real article) that keeps us constantly tense and miserable. Now, more than ever, it’s important to take stock of our mental hygiene and do our best to take control of it. Because the world is only going to get worse, the media louder, and the rhetoric more frightening.

JOHN CARPENTER, THE TIME TO KILL IS NOW

is more likely that you, dear reader, are less familiar with the Cannibal Corpse pun in the title you just read than the works of the legendary John Carpenter. Known for writing, directing and/or scoring such revered classics as Halloween, The Thing, They Live, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China and more, Carpenter has been embraced as an icon in the world of synth music and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the release of the first installment of his Lost Themes series back in 2015. The latest chapter, Lost Themes IV: Noir, explores the setting of the gritty noir genre while retaining his signature atmosphere. But this isn’t the movie column (at least, not until Albert gets sick of this nerdy shit). Carpenter, for all his years in Hollywood, is a dedicated gamer through and through, and would much sooner gush about Dead Space than answer another question about the ending of The Thing. Though our extended online interview with Carpenter focuses much more on what he loves in regards to digital escapism, it’s in the discussion here where we find out what can quickly make a game maddeningly tedious for him.

EXCLUSIVES STORE.DECIBELMAGAZINE.COM

There’s nice, medieval kind of magic games, characters with magical powers and you have to collect this [and that]?…

LIFE’S TOO SHORT FOR THAT. I JUST WANT TO KILL.

Your new album, Lost Themes IV: Noir, explores the nebulously defined noir genre.

[Laughs] You don’t know what the noir genre is? Well, part of the press release said that it was pretty nebulously defined, that it’s not just a collection of tropes. With the music that you play, typically you wouldn’t associate distorted guitar with a classic noir setting.

Sure. Oh, no, I see what you mean. You’re right. But the feel of noir is this kind of post-World War II hopeless reaction to the happy times that people wanted in America—the house, the family, the wife in the kitchen cooking with an apron and all that. We kind of go into a darkness land with a bunch of dark characters. There’s a hopeless feel to noir. That attracts me immediately. Of the games that you’ve played, do you feel that any adequately capture that noir feeling to you?

Not exactly, but… You know, noir is just a dark story, and so, in that sense, there’s a lot of dark stories, [such as] “zombies have taken over.”

In The Last of Us, it’s fungus people—I don’t know, whatever they are—which is a good game, it’s a fun game. I got stuck on The Last of Us [Part] II. I couldn’t start a generator. I just couldn’t do it. I kept trying and trying and trying. So, I stopped. It was unbelievable. I was so ashamed. It’s a game! You have nothing to prove.

Well, yeah… I think I do. Anyway. There are a lot of popular games. I’m not sure if I’m getting this right: Skyrim? You collect a lot of shit. I just can’t get into that. There’s nice, medieval kind of magic games, characters with magical powers and you have to collect this [and that]? Bleah, come on. Life’s too short for that. I just want to kill. [Laughs] Do you need your stories more rooted in the current day?

No, it’s not that. It’s just the amount of excitement, you know? There’s nothing exciting about having to level up all the time, to having to do it and having to come back to something, you know? Come on, now. But everything has this “level up, come and get me later.”

CONTINUE AT DECIBELMAGAZINE.COM PHOTO BY SOPHIE GRANSARD

DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 19

KNOCKED LOOSE

alk to anyone who’s worked as a restaurant server and they’ll tell you the worst time to work is when the after-church crowd roars in on their sense-of-superiority steeds and entitled arks following Sunday morning service. And growing up in Oldham County, KY, surrounded by religion “because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Isaac Hale witnessed on multiple occasions the manifestation of the quip, “There’s no hate like Christian love.” So, he wrote a song about it: “Blinding Faith,” the lead single from Knocked Loose’s third and punishingly heavy new album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To. ¶ “That song is twofold,” explains the guitarist. “It’s directed at people who use religion to cover their shitty beliefs and shitty personalities, but it’s also talking about people who throw themselves into religion without questioning anything where it’s like, ‘This makes me a good person and I no longer have to answer to anything else.’ Growing up, I played music in different churches, and those places were always filled with the worst fucking people! They were super-entitled pricks, 20 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

but it was all fine because they were told showing up from 8-10 on Sunday made them a good person. But I do want to point out, that sort of thing is definitely not limited to Kentucky.” The scope of You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To isn’t limited to experiences at home in the Bible Belt’s buckle either. The past few years have seen Knocked Loose explode to become one of the biggest names in metallic hardcore. It’s been a surreal and unexpected journey from VFW halls and basements to sold-out tours, being the token (but celebrated) heavy band at Coachella and Bonnaroo and working with Grammy-nominated producer Drew “WZRD BLD” Fulk (Disturbed, Pop Evil, Lil Wayne). “The conversation started with us saying, ‘We want to do something different.’ We love [producer] Will Putney, but we never wanted to be the band that stuck with one

dude. We wanted to venture out and ended up working with Drew because we wanted someone who had different genre experience. But we learned he’s a hardcore kid from North Carolina who used to book Advent and Between the Buried and Me back in the day. That was cool because there was a middle ground with this dude who knows the mainstream world, but also knows where we’re from. His mix [of the album] is one of my favorite mixes ever; it’s super-grating, intense, big and ignorant. “He’s exactly where Knocked Loose is,” Hale laughs. “We’re playing Coachella and Billie Eilish is watching us, but at the same time, we’re all listening to Hatebreed. We’re in a different world where the scope is bigger, but when it comes down to it, Knocked Loose is still a crushing band that’s supposed to sound insane.” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

PHOTO BY BROCK FETCH

KNOCKED LOOSE

Metalcore’s brightest hope isn’t guided by the light

TERMINAL NATION Arkansas bruisers take life’s best shots, hit back even harder

tan liszewski, the towering vocalist of Little Rock’s own Terminal Nation, is positively bursting with hometown pride whenever you get him going about the local hardcore scene and broader heavy music community. He also knows exactly what people from outside the South tend to think about his neighbors and his rural, red state adopted home, and he’s not here for it. ¶ “You want to talk shit about Arkansas?” he says. “You think Arkansas sucks? Whatever, fuck you. Arkansas versus everybody.” ¶ Liszewski may have been born in East Los Angeles, but his allegiances are clear, and local pride infuses Terminal Nation’s pummeling new album, Echoes of the Devil’s Den. The title is an homage to a local state park known for its paranormal activity (“the quickest way to get to meet Satan is in that park,” Liszewski swears), but doubles as a metaphor for the band’s own struggles to get the damn record finished. ¶ “That was our nod to representing Arkansas, but I feel like we did kind of live in the Devil’s Den throughout the writing process 22 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

for this album,” he explains. Last year, a tornado hit Liszewski’s house (where the band practices and records), and bassist Chase Turner was injured in a horrific car accident. Both men stared death in the face, and their bandmates and families were pulled into the void right along with them. It wasn’t looking good for Terminal Nation (or their album deadline for 20 Buck Spin), but somehow they pulled it off. Turner even managed to play a show a mere month after landing in the hospital, and Liszewski’s basement recording setup was miraculously spared by the twister. The result is the best thing they’ve ever done. The five-piece’s hardcore-ina-death-metal-longsleeve take on brutality is hard as steel-toes on concrete, but there are some unexpected moments of melody, too, and an even more unexpected special guest. “This guy hit us up a couple years ago and said, ‘I really love

what you guys are doing, it sounds like Obituary meets His Hero Is Gone,’” Liszewski says. “And it was Jesse Leach from the band Killswitch Engage. We were like, well, he’s into our band, should we just throw a Hail Mary and see? This guy’s a professional musician. I don’t know if he’s gonna be into that idea of being on a hardcore/ death metal-leaning record. But we just hit him up and he was like, ‘Absolutely.’” The end result, “Merchants of Bloodshed,” stomps and slams, then breaks down into a synth-drenched clean section where Leach takes over. That willingness to experiment (and to offer exactly zero quarter to fascists or bootlickers of any stripe) is part of why Terminal Nation have so much juice, even amidst a bumper crop of hardcore/ death metal hybrids. If it’s really Arkansas versus everybody, everybody better start watching their backs. —KIM KELLY

PHOTO BY JACOB MURRY

TERMINAL NATION

FUNERAL LEECH

Time-obsessed death/doom act passes over us, but leaves its shadow behind

ime has a funny way of reminding you it’s not endless for us, but endless for itself. Had a shitty day? Time moves on. Going through a breakup? Time moves on. The world is ending outside? Time moves on. Lost a family member or loved one? Time moves on. It is a cruel, harsh truth we all need to come to terms with.” ¶ The relentless forward march of time, free of concern for your trials, troubles and limited earthly existence, forms the thematic bedrock of The Illusion of Time, the second album by New York death/doomsters Funeral Leech. Drummer/vocalist Lucas Anderson, quoted above, is the figure behind the weighty concept underpinning his band’s funereal death metal. ¶ “I always want to write something that someone can relate to, even if it is in a form of escapism,” Anderson confirms. “The band’s themes have always centered around our collective struggle with mental health. I always looked up to bands that painted vivid haunting images while touching on real-life struggles and issues. Bands like Autopsy and Dystopia touched on mental health, and that always resonated with me. That is what I hoped to achieve here.” ¶ Meanwhile, Funeral Leech have doubled down on their funeral doom side, 24 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

almost sounding Finnish in the process, as moments of dark-hued melody reflect off the impervious edifice they’ve crafted. “I’d say we’ve progressed to have a little more melody, and our slow doom parts are ever slower and more sorrowful this time around,” agrees Anderson. “I had the pleasure of playing some synthesizers on this album, and that addition makes the vibe even more mournful. We definitely took the funeral part of our name seriously this time with all the funeral doom influences we added to the mix. I really felt like we channeled our inner Mournful Congregation or Asunder with this one. “Additionally,” Anderson continues, “I went through a lot in my personal life during this recording process. Not long after we finished recording, I lost my father very suddenly, and that changed the perspective of the record a lot for me. One of the songs, ‘Penance,’ is about his lifelong struggle with depression, and how I viewed it as a child, and how I learned about it growing up experiencing the same thing.”

With the passage of time and the inevitable loss of loved ones comes stark realizations around our fragile mortality. In a subgenre like death metal, which generally glorifies human demise in its many (often gruesome) forms, Funeral Leech offer a more emotionally considered perspective. Because of this, we have to ask Anderson what he thinks happens when we die—do we transcend to another plane of consciousness or simply become fetid maggot fodder? “Ultimately, I don’t think there is much after we die,” he responds. “I think we will always leave behind something, an essence that will stick with whomever it has affected. I think that can take so many different forms— and that’s the necromantic side of the band. It’s about worshiping the dead, and respecting what they did before us, and what they left us with. If you go out looking for meaning in death, you’re going to find it everywhere you turn.” —DEAN BROWN

PHOTO BY EVAN HUNTER McKNIGHT

FUNERAL LEECH

TZOMPANTLI

Expanding West Coast project racks up a new death/doom skullcrusher

WHO

among us doesn’t appreciate a wicked caveman death metal riff set to a beat so simple that the human heart could have written it? Those basic instincts are what Brian “Obsidian Bear” Ortiz is laser-focused on with Tzompantli’s sophomore album, Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force. ¶ “Technical death metal bands are cool, and I am a fan of a lot of technical death metal, but it’s not me,” he says. “Some of the most memorable songs are the most simple songs, and I definitely want something that is going to be remembered… that you can groove with, that you can get lost in. Something like that where you are going to get pummeled by these riffs, but you’re going to get lost in a trance-like state. That’s what I was going for.” ¶ Inspired by Mesoamerican folklore and Indigenous struggle against the Spanish conquistadors—Miguel Leon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico was a source text—Beating the Drums grabs our attention from the get-go with the nightmarish “Tetzahuitla,”

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a song written about the apocalyptic visions and omens that Indigenous peoples had before colonialists arrived, and announced with a ceremonial death-growl vocal chant that could raise the dead. Tzompantli is ostensibly a solo project of Ortiz’s, but he welcomed a cast of friends and collaborators to the studio to help track the album. Ortiz played all the rhythm guitar, some leads and bass, with Erol Ulug, Manzig Sanchez, Mateotl Boughton and Justin Ton playing the more pyrotechnic guitar solos, and Eric Delgado helping on bass. Alejandro Aranda handled drums and helped with folk instruments and traditional percussion. Ortiz adopted the rhythms used by ceremonial Mexica Aztec dancers who perform in the parks of his hometown Pomona, CA. He took the traditional Mesoamerican huehuetl drum and tapped out Nativeinspired rhythms before layering more complex rhythms on top.

For all its simplicity, Beating the Drums takes a turn for the epic, with haunting death/doom sections, and a sense that it is being animated by a vital force beyond Ortiz’s understanding. “People talk about ancestor worship, I think a lot of it is stuff that’s baked into my DNA,” says Ortiz. “I just went with the flow with a lot of the patterns.” What Ortiz does understand is how to make a psychoactive stew of Morbid Angel, Mortician, Evoken and diSEMBOWELMENT influences, how to deliver a gnarly death-growl in Nahuatl, and how to find balance between mind, body and soul. “It’s not just like your typical knuckle-dragging death metal,” he says. “Meat and potatoes is great, but I love the doom passages, the black and death metal passages you get sucked into and vibe out on… before you go back to knuckle-dragging again.” —JONATHAN HORSLEY

PHOTO BY LUCKEE NGIN

TZOMPANTLI

HORNDAL

Local Swedish metallic activists can stop steel

etal has a history of broad gestures, but musical inspiration sometimes comes in small, unsuspecting packages. For Henrik Levahn, vocalist and guitarist in Swedish sludge outfit Horndal, the inspiration came between a capitalized letter and a period. ¶ “We stumbled upon a sentence in an old essay republished by a local historian,” he begins. “It said, [in 1909] ‘The young union leader Alrik Andersson was harassed, blacklisted and forced into exile in America.’ That sentence drove me crazy and compelled me to dive into the archives for years to uncover this forgotten story about a man— forgotten in Horndal, Sweden, and even in America. This is the first time his story has been told.” ¶ Levahn turned Andersson’s tragic arc into the band’s upcoming concept album, Head Hammer Man. Researching Andersson’s life (virtually no info on him is available online in English) turned Levahn into an amateur detective: “I visited all relevant archives in Sweden and signed up on Ancestry.com, where I found passenger lists and addresses in America—as well as his living relatives. Holly, [Andersson’s] granddaughter, could tell me about his life in America, 28 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

but she didn’t know anything about his life in Sweden. He never spoke about his role in this dramatic part of Swedish history.” The history of Horndal the town has always been Horndal the band’s M.O., but according to Levahn, the story behind Head Hammer Man also resonates with today’s class struggles. “1909 shares many similarities with the ongoing strike against Tesla, who is refusing to negotiate with the union,” he says. ”Additionally, the themes from our previous albums, addressing shutdowns and new companies seeking to exploit natural resources, seem to resonate with struggles occurring worldwide.” But for those disinclined toward politics (or reading), fear not—Levahn insists that Horndal don’t resort to sloganeering or party drama. “We are a rock band,” he says. “You can headbang to the riffs without giving a shit about lyrics. But if you are interested, we have something to say.” Irrespective of lyrics, Head Hammer Man is a genre-bending slice of

rollicking riffs and roaring vocals. It recalls Mastodon’s golden age while experimenting with jazz, Kosmische and other extra-metallic tropes, thanks to Henrik Levahn’s brother Pontus, Horndal’s drummer, multi-instrumentalist and primary songwriter. “My musical taste is all over the place; I just happen to play in a metal band,” says Pontus, who employed ABBA’s grand piano to enrich the record and tapped former In Solitude/Ghost guitarist Henrik Palm to contribute two solos. “A pretentious cliché? Perhaps. But in my opinion, metal should feel somewhat dangerous, violent and haunting. Those feelings can be found in ’70s Kosmische music from Germany, free jazz, postpunk, progressive rock and modern classical, as well as in Autopsy, Judas Priest and Mercyful Fate, so combining them with doomy riffs works well. At least, I think so. I would get bored otherwise.” —JOSEPH SCHAFER

MIKE BROWNING AND NOCTURNUS AD

ARE HAVING THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES. THE ONLY QUESTION IS, WHAT TIME IS IT?

STORY BY SARAH KITTERINGHAM PHOTOS BY TIM HUBBARD

onceptually and sonically, Florida death metallers Nocturnus AD are flat-out unusual. Chronically underrated, the first iteration of the band (which had no “AD” in their moniker) released a masterpiece with 1990’s The Key, a bizarro-world technical death metal album laden with jaunty keyboards, unusual vocals that are gruffly sung rather than growled and a comic book-esque thematic concept spanning multiple tracks. ¶ Helmed by vocalist and drummer Mike Browning (ex-Incubus, ex-Morbid Angel, ex-Acheron, ex-Argus), Nocturnus helped redefine the boundaries of death metal, and are credited with normalizing keyboards in the genre. Despite their success, things fell to shit internally; those exploits need not be detailed in-depth here. ¶ Over three decades later, Nocturnus AD are reigning. In 1999 (then again in 2000 until 2013, and then officially again in 2013), following disputes over the moniker and lineup, Browning reinvigorated the band. He was eager to revisit the chronicles of Dr. Magus, the space-traveling, Jesus-killing anti-hero ravaged by a plague dubbed the Andromeda Strain. This reinvigoration resulted in 2019’s Paradox, a shockingly congruent follow-up that somehow matched the quality of its predecessor. In May, Dr. Magus returns once more on Nocturnus AD’s second album, Unicursal. J UAY N E2 02 20 42 4: :D D 30 : M EE C ICBI B EE LL

“It started on The Key where he was an evil scientist, and he was on the last few songs,” explains Browning, a passionate occult enthusiast who grew up voraciously consuming texts found at Tampa’s own Merlin’s Bookstore. That passion is deeply embedded in his lyrics alongside fantastical comic book themes. “What it ends up being is the last four or five songs on every record except for [1992’s] Thresholds—the last four or five songs tell a loose story of an evil scientist who gets ravaged by this plague… but he survives. He builds this secret lab in a cave. Then he makes this suit to live in because there’s not much of him left. “It’s a story about him surviving and what happens. He builds a time machine to go back in time, which is ‘Destroying the Manger’ [a track from The Key], and he wants to change everything and take over the world. So, he figures if he goes back to zero B.C and he destroys Jesus in the manger, he can take over. He takes over the earth and builds an empire in Egypt.”

Despite the internal turmoil that plagued his projects, Browning was eager to revisit the musical arc. He’s joined in this mission by guitarists Belial Koblak and Demian Heftel, keyboardist Josh Holdren and new bassist Kyle Sokol (the bass on Unicursal was performed by now-ex-bassist Daniel Tucker). “When I did Nocturnus AD, I was like, ‘I’m going to pick up where we left off from The Key and go back to the Dr. Magus story,’” Browning explains. “With Paradox, I went through different things; how he gained all these powers… He’s sent on these missions: They send him back to the earth, but he’s already collected his symbol that he wears on his chest from the earth. He collected it in the droid ship. That’s where he found it. And it was the thing that made his time machine work. So, when he collected that symbol, it made his suit work and it made his time machine work. It’s an alien technology. When the aliens bring him back on Paradox, they give him all these powers and they send him on these missions to go through the spheres of the Kabbalah.” Unicursal accompanies Dr. Magus as he explores the lower realms of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to collect their respective sigils, including on the tracks “Mission Malkuth” (representing

the Kingdom), “Yesod, the Dark Side of the Moon” (representing the Foundation), “Hod, the Stellar Light” (representing the Splendour) and “Netzach, The Fire of Victory” (representing Endurance and, you guessed it, Victory). “There’s so many ways you can use the Kabbalah,” enthuses Browning, who is particularly inspired by British ceremonial magician and acclaimed novelist Dion Fortune, who wrote 1935’s The Mystical Qabalah. “I really like her stuff and the way she explains the Kabbalah. A lot of people look at it as like a filing cabinet of where you can file things in your life under different experiences through the Tree of Life. That’s basically what I was doing with this… Each time he goes to a different sphere, he has to complete the mission, and then he’s able to gain that symbol!” Browning continues excitedly: “[Dr. Magus] fights this creature that lives in a really deep cavern in a crater on the moon. And there’s an altar. And then he fights this creature and destroys it, and then he gets the symbol, and then he goes on to the next… And then there’s more of a personal, mind type of thing that he has to conquer, you know? Once he does that, he picks up a symbol from Hod, and then he goes to Netzach, which is like a victory. Since it’s a

female aspect of the Tree of Life, there’s a female there that’s an ethereal being.” In conclusion, “He wakes up from his dreaming sleep and he comes to the portal to the earth and takes over the earth!” Unicursal (and the remainder of Nocturnus AD’s releases) contain other standalone stories alongside the Dr. Magus arc. Indeed, Browning is a fan of serial stories, creating thematic arcs that span each of the three albums including “Neolithic” (from The Key), “Paleolithic” (from Paradox) and “Mesolithic” on Unicursal. “Mesolithic” is particularly unique for another reason entirely. “Our guitar player Belial has this ring of goat toes,” explains Browning of “Mesolithic,” which is marked by both the goat toes and the integration of djembes. “They’re on this ring of string, you know… When you shake it, they hit each other, all the little goat toes.” All told, the story of Nocturnus AD is incomplete. There are more stories and music impending, and that is hyper-intentional. Browning simply oozes passion. He’s a nerd, and in no way is that a bad thing. In fact, it’s glorious. “I’m trying not to finish anything. Like a comic book. A lot of comic book stories never really finish. They just keep continuing.”

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In the Blue Hour FROM THE WASTELAND ’S VIOLET HOUR TO THE NEW NELL’ ORA BLU, NOIR-LOVING CINEASTE KEVIN STARRS TAKES HIS U.K. RIPPERS

UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS

TO THE MOVIES—IN ITALY! STORY PHOTO BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ BY KARIN HUNT

oomed to kill,” snarled the cover of Decibel’s December 2018 issue. ¶

Pandemic un-portending, fall 2018 called down another harrowing harvest from Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats. Starting in 2011, Bloodlust, Mind Control and The Night Creeper ramped up a hard-rock hysteria peaking on that October’s The Wasteland, a lacerating downstroke of nervy doom and witching classicism from the U.K. wraiths. Two months later, the dB headline reset a conversation in need of change, according to that issue’s marquee fiend and project principal Kevin Starrs: “There’s a lot more going on than just Black Sabbath.” ¶ As such, orthodox Brummies aren’t at all prepared for Uncle Starrs’ follow-up, Nell’ Ora Blu, a dialogue-laced Italian crime thriller whose soundtrack accompanies no actual film. ¶ “Yeah,” chuckles Starrs from the same locale we reached him pre-coronavirus, outside of London. “It felt like time to do something different. I’ve always wanted to do a soundtrack, so I started making instrumental pieces and that evolved into then writing a script and getting actors involved. It just kind of snowballed.” 32 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

Glasgow-born to Scottish parents, but raised in Great Britain, the bandleader represents his clan’s home of the brave right down to a jerseyclad fanaticism for Celtic FC. Soft in speech, lightly and liltingly accented, and quick to laugh, Starrs shrugs off his cinematic treatment as simply a few pages of giallo worship. Pulphatched Italo exploitation movement borne out of 1960s cataclysm, the genre gripped the noirloving guitarist with its psychological mayhem. “Vengeance comes calling when the law is not enough,” proclaims Nell’ Ora Blu, which then outlines its storyline thusly: Set in 1970s Italy, Franco Nero plays Giovanni Scarano, an untouchable and corrupt official who has destroyed his local community during years of power. His place in high office has seen him shut down factories, allowing his small town to decay into squalor with high crime rates and mass

unemployment. He encourages police brutality. He steals from public resources and preys on the poor and weak. His ties to a compliant press, corrupt police force and criminal gangs ensure that he never faces justice. Scarano’s gotta go, obviously, signaling the album’s theme: “Vendetta (Tema).” And if the actor playing the protagonist rings one of hell’s bells, don’t rouse Scotsmen Bon Scott and Malcolm Young just yet. Nero, 82, boasts more than 200 big screen credits, including 1967 King Arthur musical Camelot with future/present wife Vanessa Redgrave; Luis Buñuel’s Tristana opposite Catherine Deneuve; and Die Hard 2 as the heavy, General Ramon Esperanza. “Calling agents and getting a hold of actors, and recording them, was quite an undertaking,” admits Starrs. “Contracts, translations—it’s taken two or three years just to finish the album. Many of the actors were dead. The main two I wanted were Franco and Edwige [Fenech]. One guy died a week before [I meant to ring him]. That was strange. “Someone like Franco Nero, you see these films and never expect to one day call them at 10 a.m. on a Sunday to record their lines. And there he is, in character, shouting down the phone, ‘Bastardo! Bastardo!’ “It was an honor to speak to those two especially, but they all did such a good job.” The cast executed such an unbelievable job that one day metal bands will sample Nell’ Ora Blu for its dramaturgy. Goosing a tale advanced through phone calls, Fenech, 75, who worked with celluloid pioneers Mario Brava and Lucio Fulci, co-leads the clutch of Luc Merenda,

Massimo Vanni and Giovanni Lombardo Radice. Mellifluous and ultimately hypnotic Italian matches the album’s musical cues measure for measure.

Calling agents and getting a hold of actors, and recording them, was quite an undertaking. Contracts, translations— it’s taken two or three years just to finish the album.

MANY OF THE ACTORS WERE DEAD. Kevin Starrs

Spined by Floydian echoes, including the fiveminute titular float, Nell’ Ora Blu levitates Starrs’ self-taught and improvised keyboard experimentalism and Mellotron work. Ennio Morricone (“La Vipera”) to Tangerine Dream (“Tortura al Telefono”), the audio recrimination crackles and

pops psychedelic soul such as “Solo la Morte ti Ammanetta,” a.k.a. “Only Death Handcuffs You.” Most obvious standalone here, its dual, highpitched vocals and stinging, metallic edges— serrated guitars and crimson melodies—bottle Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats’ trademark elixir. “The whole idea of the album, Nell’ Ora Blu, which means ‘In the Blue Hour,’ is that the blue hour happens twice during a 24-hour period,” explains the writer/director/producer, who cites Goblin’s Suspiria and Blade Runner by Vangelis as his favorite soundtracks. “It happens before darkness and before sunrise, so it’s a metaphor. They’re going to commit this act of revenge. Is it going to bring sunrise—sunshine and happiness—or will it bring darkness and all the rest?” His album notes offer a clue: “You can never beat the house.” That’s revenge for you. “Exactly!” exclaims Starrs. “That’s the thing. They think they’re going to get revenge and everything’s going to be great, but it never turns out that way.” And such is noir. “Film noir put me in a whole different world,” offers Starrs. “Before that, I never really got into black and white films, which sounds ignorant. But I was in my late teens and really sick one day, so I turned on the TV and this black and white film was starting, footsteps crossing the street. “The film was [Otto Preminger’s] Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews. I sat in bed, feeling really horrible, and was transported into this black and white world. That really kickstarted a love affair with film noir. I just thought, ‘I need to experience more of this.’”

DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 33

Doom titans PALLBEARER lighten their sonic (but not emotional) impact on Mind Burns Alive story by JEFF TREPPEL photo by DAN ALMASY

pace is a recurring theme when it comes to talking about Pallbearer’s

fifth album, Mind Burns Alive. Not the kind of space where you find invasions or rituals or jams. It’s more the kind of space found in musical openness, self-reflection and the time between record releases that

allows enough room for the songs to truly blossom. ¶ Joe Rowland, the band’s bassist/co-vocalist, cites a familiar reason for the four-year delay between albums: “Obviously, the pandemic put us on pause for a while, like we had been in like this really long period of just grinding and releasing music and then touring on it. And that was a lifestyle that we were really used to, but also at the same time was kind of wearing us down a lot, so having the opportunity to take a step back and not feel like we were on this constant deadline to get things done was great.”

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“We fully intended to have the songs ready and released by, like, 2021, maybe,” adds co-vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell. “But, you know, some events went down. And it turned out that it’s 2024 and it’s finally coming out. I think that ended up kind of being like—although it didn’t feel that way at the time—it ended up being kind of like a blessing in disguise, because we ended up using that large interval between what we expected and what ended up being reality, to really get to focus on the songs in a way that we hadn’t been able to do since our first album, when there is no deadline, there’s no expectation, you’re just fully in that creative mode.” This relaxed atmosphere was aided by Rowland’s return to Arkansas from his decade-

long tenure in New York City so he could open his own recording studio, which would’ve been cost-prohibitive in Brooklyn. Having their own space to play around in really let the band (rounded out by guitarist Devin Holt and drummer Mark Lierly) mess around with the songs without worrying about burning cash. Which led to some happy accidents. “There was an afternoon that Devin was at my studio, tracking some of his solos on the record,” Rowland tells us. “He finished the final phrase of the solo at the end of ‘Signals,’ and then just out of nowhere, his amp started picking up a radio frequency and what was being said in the dialogue—it was like a talk radio show—somehow fit very well thematically with the song. It just seemed like so unbelievably coincidental, I guess, or like sheer, amazing happenstance.” It’s not surprising they found an appropriate sample on talk radio—the lyrics tackle people’s headspaces. Rowland describes it as being “an album about mental duress, like, perception gone wrong. Every song is sort of like a vignette or a portrait of someone or someone who’s in the midst of some kind of mental break.”

Campbell expounds on what that means in his contributions: “I try to leave a degree of openness to most of my songs to where someone can hear it and see something that might apply to their lives. I don’t want to over-universalize stuff to the point of it being generic, or just ultimately meaningless. I think there’s a fine line. ‘Where the Light Fades’ is very personal, and a letter to a person who probably doesn’t care. ‘Signals’ is a hybrid of a few different people. But it’s a response to knowing some people who are pretty broken and the desire to see them get better, even though it may not ever happen. And there’s probably some self-reflection in there, too. I’ve been pretty fucked up at times in my life, too. So, there’s a lot to draw from.” The music itself actually had its genesis in the same writing sessions as 2020’s Forgotten Days. One listen to the actual tracks and it’s immediately clear why the band saved them for a different album: This is a more vulnerable and—while not necessarily mellow—introspective record. Campbell cites some very nonmetallic acts as influential on their approach, certainly a contrast to the more raw, dense Forgotten Days material.

Roll somethimnget, hing crack so rn it up! and tu

“It’s like, well, let’s explore our sound with more subtlety. Joe and I have always wanted to do some more like true slowcore-sounding shit. Because stuff like the early Red House Painters albums, and the first several—I like all the discography, but specifically the stuff we’re drawing from—Low albums, Codeine, the later Talk Talk albums, they’re just beautiful, minimalistic, melancholy. And if you listen to those Low albums, for example, it’s all just this extremely sparse guitar and like a snare drum. But if you were to put distortion on that, it would sound like a doom record, because it’s just these deep spaces. And so, it’s like, well, just write the same [Pallbearer] stuff, but don’t hit the distortion. And it works.” Rowland concurs with that analysis: “To me, the motion of the record is presented through restraint instead of, like—I think we’ve relied a lot on heavy, bombastic dynamics in the past with a sprinkling of lighter touches, and we inverted that on this record. Let there be a lot of space, let there be a lot of quiet, stripped-down sections. And let the emotion live through that instead of just having it be almost always loud and crushing. We wanted the quiet to be crushing.”

From sultry and restrained to soaring and explosive

Marten GRAVESIDE GRIN

THE CRUSHING NEW ALBUM OF BOSTON-BRED SLUDGE METAL FROM THE ORIGINAL DIVE BAR DEVILS available on Vinyl LP and Digisleeve CD

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interview by

QA j. bennett

WI T H

SLAYER’s guitarist discusses his new band’s debut LP, From Hell I Rise, and his old band’s reunion shows

36 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

I’M

multitasking, approving some band photos while

I’m talking to you.” That’s Slayer guitarist Kerry King, but the band photos he’s talking about aren’t for Slayer. They’re for his new homonymous solo band, which also features Death Angel vocalist Mark Osegueda, ex-VioLence/Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel, former Hellyeah bassist Kyle Sanders and Slayer drummer Paul Bostaph. That the band’s debut, From Hell I Rise, is very Slayer-esque shouldn’t surprise anyone. King wrote the majority of Slayer’s 2015 swansong, Repentless, himself. In fact, two of the songs on From Hell I Rise are from those sessions. Plus, you’ve got two members of Slayer alongside Demmel, who is so steeped in the band’s music that he filled in for guitarist Gary Holt for four shows in 2018. ¶ Much more surprising, perhaps: Slayer are coming out of retirement after playing what had previously been billed as their final shows in November of 2019. As of this writing, they’re booked for three festivals this fall. “It was the right offer at the right time,” King explains. “I think people are assuming Slayer is going to tour again, [or] Slayer is going to record again, and I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. But the offer for the one-offs came up, and they happened to be around the fifth anniversary of our final tour, so it was intriguing to me.” ¶ Beyond that? After living his entire life in Southern California, King recently moved to New York City. “My wife’s from here. She escaped a 20-year exile on the West Coast,” our man says with a laugh. “I’ve never really been a city kid, so getting thrust into that lifestyle is different than living in the suburbs in Southern California, but I’ve been around the world countless times so I can pretty much adjust to anywhere. The thing is, New York is probably the place I’ve been to the most, but I never really took the time to learn what’s what—where’s SoHo, where’s Chelsea?—so, now I know all the stuff I probably should’ve learned 30 years ago.” From what I understand, you wanted to release From Hell I Rise under a band name rather than your own name. What changed?

Anybody that knows me knows that I’m not a vain person, but I was being pushed to have at least part of my name in the band name. It was gonna be King’s Reign for a long time, but there was a trademark issue. I dragged my feet as long as I could because I wanted the coolest name that fit our band. I went so far as to look through a dictionary trying to combine words that hadn’t been used. Try that someday—it’s fucking tough. But during that time, we came up with the logo that we have now—except now it’s two K’s—and I love the logo. It blows me away every time I look at it. Then our first shows got announced, so we had to roll with what we had. The album title is also a song title, but theoretically you could’ve named the album after any of the songs. Why did you choose that one?

I think it really tells the tale of what’s been happening to me since Slayer went away. Maybe you P H O T O B Y J I M L O U VA U

could consider Slayer being my hell or the writing process being my hell, but it’s Kerry King coming back. Plus, that’s a killer song. It just worked for me all the way around. You could say the same thing about the first song we released, “Idle Hands.” Idle hands do the devil’s work, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years preparing for my record to come out. In another interview, you said, “If you’ve liked any part of Slayer throughout our history, there’s something on this record that you can get into.” How important was it to keep the Slayer spirit alive on this record?

To be honest, I wasn’t really trying to do that. I think it just happened because, as Slayer reached the end of its recording life, I started being responsible for more and more stuff. Like, Repentless was 95 percent mine. This record is 100 percent mine, which is just the obvious next step. And I’m not looking to do anything drastically different than before, because I like that music anyway. If I was a fan, this is the music that I’d be into. Lucky for me, I get to make it.

The title track and “Rage” were originally recorded for Repentless. Were they the starting point for this record?

I had always planned on including those. I’ve got four other songs that weren’t on Repentless. I didn’t know how many new ones I would write or how the Repentless ones would weigh against the stuff I’d written since our last show. But those two were all done—they had lyrics, they had leads—so we just re-recorded them for this session and I had Phil play the lead that Gary was playing originally. They were as much a starting point as anything. You wrote all the lyrics. How much of that was done before you brought Mark in?

Quite a bit. He’s the only guy who practiced with me and Paul. I began the transformation of Mark months before he even knew he had the gig. When we recorded, it’s amazing where he ended up. Some of the registers he sang in, I was like, “You can reproduce this, right? I don’t wanna be putting out product where you sing one day and then you’re down for the count for five days because you blew your voice out.” But the performances he gave are awesome and exciting, and I didn’t hear most of them until he went in to do the final tracking. Yeah, he sounds different than he usually does. It doesn’t sound like Slayer with Mark from Death Angel on vocals.

Yeah, I think it’s got a freshness to it. Does it remind me of Slayer? Of course it does. I wrote it. Not that Slayer was stale, but this is the next step. It’s me and Paul from Slayer, and he and I work so well together that he was my obvious choice. So, the nucleus obviously lends itself to sounding like Slayer, but I think with Mark singing and Kyle playing bass and Phil doing some solos, it just gave it a different flavor. Do you think this record would’ve been different if it had been a Slayer record instead of your own?

Probably, because these guys are just happy to be in this band. It’s a fresh step for them. When people start saying, “Kerry put another supergroup together,” the way I look at it is, I put together a band of guys that didn’t have any work. The only one that had work was Mark. The rest of them were looking for a job. Luckily, they were friends of mine, and the timing worked out. Which was good for me, because if this had happened another time, maybe they would’ve got work elsewhere. When you put the band together, you started with Paul.

Oh, yeah. Paul was always there. Originally, DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 37

 Straight from Hell

Kerry (c) and all the King’s men

The first Kerry King show is coming up in May. How are you feeling about it? It’s been a while since you’ve been onstage.

Nerves aren’t a thing for me because I’ve done this for so long. But I’m super excited. I’m excited to get onstage with my friends in my new band and rip some faces off some hungry fans. Will you be playing Slayer songs, or is that off the table now that Slayer is doing reunion shows?

I think it’s got a freshness to it. Does it remind me of Slayer? Of course it does. I wrote it.

Did you consider anyone besides Mark for the vocal position?

Well, Mark threw his name in the hat quite early. I knew he was into it, and he’s a friend of mine. You gotta do your due diligence and see if anybody else might fit better, but at the end of the day, I’m super happy with this choice. How did you decide on Phil and Kyle?

Phil came out and did four Slayer shows in 2018 when Holt had to leave the tour to see his dad. At that point, he basically told me, “I wanna be part of your future.” That’s all it took for me. I never thought Phil was a shabby player, but after he played with us for those four shows, I was like, “Man, this guy’s better than I thought he was.” What he did for Slayer in that short amount of time I couldn’t have done for Priest, which is my favorite band. He learned our set in 48 hours. I couldn’t even have attempted that, so I was very impressed by his work ethic. I had to play my cards with Kyle a little earlier because, as we all know, unfortunately, 38 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

Vince [Abbott] left us in 2018, so I knew Kyle was out of work. I didn’t want to be insensitive, so I sent my respects and said, “If you’re looking to continue to work, I’ve got something for you in 2020.” He said something like, “I read you loud and clear.” So, we made the connection and he just waited until I got done.

What are you looking forward to most about the reunion shows?

I’m looking forward to playing again, for our fans. I’m also really looking forward to the fire. I get everything else for my band, but I can’t afford fire. So, Slayer’s going to have fire and we’re going to burn everything. Is there any aspect of it that you’re dreading?

Tell me about “Crucifixation.” You’ve said it’s the “money shot” of the album.

I always say that. But there’s so much metal in that song, dude! I think it’s really reminiscent of ’80s thrash. It’s got a giant harmonic breakdown in the middle with repetitive drum fills, and I’ve never been able to write a song like that before to give Paul that opportunity. It’s just got so many different strong points and feels and textures. To tell you the truth, the album was supposed to be called Crucifixation. In my supreme dumbness, I assumed I made that word up, but I didn’t. [Laughs] When I finally looked it up, I realized that seven or eight people had done it before me. So, I didn’t change the song title, but I changed the album title. What about “Toxic”? There’s a line in there about people forcing their opinions on others.

I wrote that one when I had COVID and I was stuck in a hotel. That was right when Roe vs. Wade got shot down, so I was pissed off about that—as most women in the country were. It made me realize that every one of the Supreme Court judges that Trump appointed lied to get the job. These are people deciding your future. These are the people making choices for us. That’s some bullshit.

No. You know, I haven’t seen Gary Holt since our last show, and I obviously blame that on the pandemic. I’ve seen Paul a lot because Paul’s in my band. But I don’t see my crew. I miss my crew— they’re like family to me. And I’m sure most of them will be back. So, that’s another high point, not a low point. I don’t have any low points. Are these three festivals it for Slayer, or do you see more shows happening?

They are definitely one-offs. If I book anything else this year, I want it to be my band. Slayer doesn’t need a profile. Slayer’s got a profile. I think it makes sense for everyone: There’s three shows celebrating the fifth year anniversary of what was our final tour. Ozzy famously announced his retirement with the “No More Tours” tour in 1992 and then continued to tour for another 25 years or so. Is that a situation you’d like to avoid with Slayer?

Without a doubt. We turned offers down for at least three years before we even considered one. The offers are always going to be there, and I’m going to shoot down shit-tons of them. But once this happens, I guarantee you, Europe’s going to want one or two. So, we’ll have to see how that flies.

PHOTO BY JIM LOUVAU

when Tom [Araya] announced to Slayer that he was gonna stop playing, I told the other guys that I had their back. But as time went on, I thought people are already gonna call this band “Baby Slayer” or “Slayer 2.0,” so I figured I had to stop taking pieces of Slayer and go in another direction. With me and Paul being from Slayer, that kinda aced Gary out. We never really talked about it, but it’s nothing against Holt at all. If I got another chance to play with him other than these one-off Slayer shows, I’d jump at it. He’s a good dude.

I always planned on doing that. To take more ammunition away from people, I’m gonna focus on the Slayer songs I wrote or had a part in writing. So, I won’t be playing “Angel of Death” or “War Ensemble” right away. This is me, so I don’t need to take anyone else’s stuff to make me better. That being said, I need Slayer songs because I don’t have enough material to headline.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

Postmortem Procedures the making of Exhumed’s Gore Metal JUNE 2024 : 40 : DECIBEL

greg pratt

1998, there was some thrilling,

forward-thinking game-changing happening in extreme underground metal. The Dillinger Escape Plan were storming the scene, making us rethink what was humanly possible on instruments, Nile were animating death metal’s mummified corpse and Nasum were blasting excitement back into grindcore. Then there was Exhumed. The California-based goregrind/death metal outfit was on Relapse, the same label as the aforementioned trailblazers, but I distinctly recall receiving promotional material for Gore Metal and noticing very much how it stuck out. These guys weren’t looking forward, they were looking back—back to the first and second Carcass records, back to Repulsion and Autopsy, and, as far as the charming recording sound goes, back to some sort of prehistoric tar pit. But these are all the reasons why Gore Metal ruled when it dropped and why it still rules today, over 25 years later. Songs: That’s another reason why Gore Metal works. As a genre, goregrind focuses on songs that are boppier and poppier than anyone would dare admit, and with Exhumed (at the time made up of vocalist/guitarist Matt Harvey, guitarist Mike Beams, bassist Ross Sewage and drummer Col Jones), I can spend years without listening to one of their records and still have “Forged in Fire” lodged in my fucking head. That number is off 2000 follow-up Slaughtercult, where they refined their writing even further, but Gore Metal is where it all began, with goregrind earworms like “Necromaniac” and “Open the Abscess” bursting with hooks and song structures that you won’t soon forget. And that was precisely the idea. The album also is of historic significance because it used its leverage on a label that was entering its peak era to shine light on this most neglected of subgenres, allowing like-minded bands like Impaled the chance to get a bit of extra attention. And don’t forget the obscene and extreme cover art; the original album title that Relapse wouldn’t agree to; the 2015 rerecording and how it changed the band’s trajectory... There’s lots to get into here, so it’s time to throw the tripe to the wall (we’ve also got to get into that, unfortunately) and see what sticks. Today we’re happy to cover the Hall in carnage as we begin the procedure, pulling back the sheet on this most pungent of records, letting the blood fly free as it teaches us that anatomy is indeed destiny and that Gore Metal is indeed worthy of a place in our hallowed Hall. Just remember to scrub your hands afterwards.

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Unbosomed secrets

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What do you remember about the songwriting process for Gore Metal? How old was some of the material? MATT HARVEY: There was a lot of disagreement

between Ross and Col and myself as far as what the record was going to be comprised of. Col was adamant that, “We’ve already recorded it, it’s not going on the album,” and I was like, but that’s how first albums work. All my favorite first albums have songs from the demos that are re-recorded. But he was like, absolutely fucking not. Then Ross wanted the album to be really long, so he wanted to use every single song that we had available up to that point, and I was sort of somewhere in the middle. The good thing—or, I don’t know if it’s good, but one thing you can say about Exhumed is that we never really stop writing. A lack of material has never been a problem for us. So, we had a lot of stuff to choose from. I don’t know that we made the best choices, but the songwriting process was just sort of ongoing, continually, from ’95 to ’98. MIKE BEAMS: When I joined, they already had the contract with Relapse, all the songs were completely written, everything was all tabbed out for me by Matt. I got those tabs, man, and that’s what I had to live for. Man, I was ready to die for Exhumed. COL JONES: Exhumed had a lot of weird, stupid rules. It comes from being a kid, and when you play death metal, you want to be true. Matt is such a prolific songwriter. You can see by the number of bands he’s in—the guy’s just a riff master. So, we felt we didn’t have to rely on older material. And playing newer material was fresher. People want to hear newer stuff. ROSS SEWAGE: At the time, as CDs became the medium everyone consumed music by, albums were becoming longer and longer. I had it in my head that you should at least give the audience nothing less than a 45-minute record and that all the songs needed to have never been heard before. It was a stupid pig-headed notion. [Laughs] Albums don’t need to be a certain length for the listener to have expectations met. Luckily, Matt and Col were pushing against some of my more abstract notions of making a record, so we didn’t end up shooting our entire load with tons of filler on some Exhumed Use Your Illusion I and II bullshit. The actual recording, the production quality of the record... HARVEY: [Laughs] “Quality!”

I think it sounded perfect. To me, that’s what I want goregrind and grimy death metal to sound like. Over the years, you have said that you

“We were a stark contrast to a lot of the bands coming to the fore at that time who were trying to look evolved and be taken seriously. They were putting on button-up shirts backstage while we had shoelaces between our teeth, tying homemade leather gauntlets onto our arms.”

RO SS SEWAG E weren’t happy with how it turned out. Obviously you re-recorded it later, so what was your beef? HARVEY: We really knew fuck-all about record-

ing. I had this sort of naive mindset at the time where I was like, well, I don’t wanna concern myself with the technical aspect or the business aspect of the band. My focus was on writing songs because I think that’s the most important thing, and I’m 22, and I think that’s all very important. The guy that engineered the record continually reassured us that everything will be fixed while mixing, and we knew that James Murphy was going to mix it, and obviously we were very familiar with his résumé as death metal fans, so we went, sure, everything’s great, this is how it’s supposed to go. And what was recorded and what James was expecting were completely different. So, he’s taking the square peg and trying to put it in the round hole, and he’s doing all these things that, if they had been properly recorded, would have worked really well, but because they weren’t… I like shit that’s raw, but it sounds really goofy to me. Even when we did it, we weren’t happy with it. But the good thing about it is it doesn’t JUNE 2024 : 4 2 : DECIBEL

sound like any other record. That counts for a lot, really. It wasn’t where we were trying to get to, but I’m much more at peace with the record now than I was even 10 years ago. BEAMS: Back then, I really liked it. I really like the guitar; it’s got a lot of grit and gain to it. But we had some issues with it. James got the mixes and wasn’t happy with how the person recorded it, so we had to do a lot of surgery in the studio with the drums and stuff. But I really like it all in all. I think it’s neck and neck with Slaughtercult as far as production. SEWAGE: I have never been happy with how Gore Metal sounds. I totally understand how it works for the material, but it’s hard for the people who played on it to have the same experience as the listener. We had worked on these songs and had expectations for how they should sound, and those expectations, lofty as they were, were not met. For my part, Matt had borrowed my bass amp for a Dekapitator show without asking me, left it in his girlfriend’s truck, and it was stolen. I’d arranged an amp to borrow, but when I showed up to record, they hadn’t bothered bringing my cabinet because they thought I didn’t

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have an amp. I’m not sure how they thought I’d record, but I ended up direct into the board and thought it sounded like shit. I was already soured on the experience, and I hadn’t even recorded a note. [Laughs] As if it’s that important how bass sounds on a death metal record, right? But it was my little piece to contribute beyond growling like a stuck pig and I felt hobbled. Tension was brewing already and it was coupled with an engineer who cut corners and left us with tons of artifacts to clean up in the mix. Then the mix itself was its own mess of arguments and volatile behavior. It was a very difficult experience and I’m sure that colors all our interpretations of how the final album sounds. JONES: That’s what’s funny: Everyone in the band hates the production of that record. Me as a drummer and the drums—and there’s really particular reasons for that, and it gets back to this theme that we have certain rules that we have to adhere to—we had an idea of what we wanted it to sound like, but it didn’t come through on Gore Metal. We recorded this in the practice room of Testament, and for most people when you record a record, you go, “Okay, that’s cool, but what kind of equipment and engineer do you have?” The location is the location, but for us, we were like, We’re recording in Testament’s practice place! That was it. It didn’t matter how bad the engineer or the equipment was. That was our level of scouting the place and how we were going to do it. Like, how cool are we that we get to record in Testament’s practice place? And it is cool. JONES: Yeah, it’s totally cool, but we had this

crappy engineer that didn’t know how to mic drums, and we didn’t know. One thing about me, which was detrimental at the time, was I had this rule that I felt other bands did too, that when you record a record—and I did this all through [2003’s] Anatomy [Is Destiny]—you can’t punch in. So, when you record a song, you have to play it beginning to end. Otherwise you’re cheating the listener—you’re faking it. Really dumb. If I’d make a mistake in the last 15 seconds of a song, I would re-record that whole song, because I felt it’d be cheating. So, we bring our turd of a record to James Murphy, who’s used to being a professional. So, garbage in, garbage out. He started throwing triggers on top of it—the things you’d do to a professional recording. I fought him against it; the triggers will bring out all my little faults, these ghost notes that would come in through the triggering. I didn’t play tight enough to be triggered. I didn’t even play to a click track— surprise, surprise. Having an idea how to record that didn’t fit with reality is how you get Gore Metal. Sometimes it turns out to be a happy

accident. I don’t think it turned out, though. [Laughs] Penicillin is something that was good that was an accident. Gore Metal is not penicillin. As we were doing it, I was like, “All right, it’s sounding pretty crazy. We’ve blown our chance with Relapse, but at the same time, I’m not playing this for anyone else but myself, so if no one else likes it, I’m totally fine with it.” Unfortunately, that’s pretty selfish of me when the other bandmates want to put out a good record so maybe they could do other records in the future. But then again, Matt and I were on the same wavelength where we were like, “Well, what would Venom do? They’d say, ‘F it,’ so let’s put it out.” So, we did, because we didn’t know any better. Can you imagine putting out Gore Metal at the same time Nile’s first record is coming out? So, in a sense you’re kinda like, well, everyone’s just gonna listen to Nile anyway. To me, the album really helped kickstart or re-energize the whole gore metal or goregrind scene in North America. It was a turning point for the genre. Did it feel like that to you? HARVEY: It’s hard to have that kind of perspective

on what you’re doing. Obviously, we were just trying to make the sickest, heaviest, most brutal record we could. But I guess I do see that after the record came out, it sort of opened the door a little bit for bands like Impaled or Engorged or basically the entire Razorback Records roster of the early 2000s to get some sort of attention. It’s not like all those bands were necessarily influenced by us, but they were in a similar vein to us, and for whatever reason, we were sort of the first ones through the door. I think people in the States had kind of forgotten about the music we were playing. JONES: It did not, because being in California, we’re kind of isolated. Can you think of any other death metal band out of Northern California other than Autopsy? Now we’ve got Necrot and Mortuous; the scene is great now. But when Exhumed was really doing it during the Gore Metal time, there were no other death metal bands here. At the time, black metal still dominated the scene. So, I didn’t feel like we kickstarted anything. At the time, and especially being on Relapse, there were lots of forward-thinking extreme metal acts that were really pushing past the borders of the genre. But you guys were doing the opposite: You dug your heels in and looked backwards for inspiration. Where did Exhumed fit in the metal world in 1998? HARVEY: That was really one of the things I

remember the most more on an emotional level about those days: We had a real feeling that we did not fit in—period. We knew a lot of the bands like Dystopia, Spazz, Man Is the Bastard. We’d go to all those shows and hang out, and it seemed like the people in the bands liked metal and liked what we were doing, but the audience JUNE 2024 : 4 4 : DECIBEL

did not care about us at all. Then the underground metal scene was like, well, if you didn’t have corpsepaint and a top hat and some guy in a cape, they weren’t really interested in what we were doing. Then there was the Hydra Head scene, the Dillingers, the Botches; certainly we were nothing like any of that. But even most death metal bands at the time were sort of this post-Cannibal, Suffocation, U.S. brutal death metal thing, and everywhere we would play, it’d be like 80 percent of the people were like, “Huh?” and 20 percent of the people might like it, and some of them might like it ironically. I can’t remember where we played, but it always sticks out to me: We got done playing, I was wearing a [Destruction] Release From Agony shirt and a bullet belt and women’s blue jeans because they didn’t sell stretch jeans for men in the late ’90s [laughs], and this dude comes up to me and is like, “Man, that’s hilarious you’re dressed like that, that’s so funny. That’s really ironic.” I was like, “What do you mean? There’s nothing ironic about this whatsoever.” It’s a weird thing to be in a band that now—and then—really is not particularly original or innovative, but yet doesn’t sit comfortably anywhere. It’s a bummer in a lot of ways, but we deflected that and turned it into something to be defiant about rather than, Oh, it sucks, no one really likes us. It’s like, no, you guys are all poseurs. We’re playing real metal. It’s your fault. JONES: That’s a great observation, I totally agree with it. [Exhumed] didn’t really [fit in], but we weren’t trying to; we were playing death metal the way we felt death metal should be played. BEAMS: I always thought we were kinda like this ugly stepchild that kinda showed up late to Christmas—no one knew what to expect. SEWAGE: Looking back now, it hadn’t even been that many years since bands like Autopsy and Carcass had given up the ghost. But it felt like ages to our immature minds since bands in our style had been paid any attention. People really looked to Exhumed as a total throwback, with our leather, spikes, gory imagery and knuckledragging riffs. We were a stark contrast to a lot of the bands coming to the fore at that time who were trying to look evolved and be taken seriously. They were putting on button-up shirts backstage while we had shoelaces between our teeth, tying homemade leather gauntlets onto our arms. People seemed to enjoy our enthusiasm, though, and that included the very forward-thinking extreme metal bands we were playing with. Every court needs a jester, and we were happy to fill that role. Gore Metal has actual songs you can remember, like “Open the Abscess” and “Limb From Limb.” Was it a conscious decision to start writing catchy songs? HARVEY: One-hundred percent. In ’94, I feel like

the band started finding what it was going to

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EXHUMED gore metal I’ve read that you originally wanted to call the album Gore Fucking Metal, but Relapse said no. Is that true? HARVEY: Yes. [Laughs] We sure did. They were just

“We wanted it to be a statement, like Black Metal— the Venom album. [Obituary’s] World Demise, I guess it’s about pollution or whatever? That’s not a knock on the record, [but] that doesn’t make me feel like, ‘Yeah! This is gonna piss off my parents! These guys hate toxic waste!’”

M AT T HA RV EY be about. The stuff we did before, there was some good riffs, some blast beats, some gross vocals— there was a bunch of elements, but there’s not really a thing to hang it on. We did sort of streamline things down to the core elements that we care about. It’s not just metal songs; it’s how rock songs work. Any pop song works the same way as “Rainbow in the Dark” or “Crazy Train” or even “Master of Puppets” or “Hell Awaits” or whatever. There’s a verse, there’s a chorus, there’s a verse, there’s a chorus, there’s a bridge, there’s maybe a third verse, and then there’s a chorus. And it sounds so obvious, but as soon as we cracked that code, we just realized writing songs was kind of effortless. It was like, “Cool, I’ve got two ideas; fuck, we’re almost there.” [Laughs] BEAMS: That’s what Matt does. He’s an excellent songwriter. I can say that I wasn’t a part of the songwriting, but I know everything Matt does he puts his mind into 110 percent. There are a lot of memorable riffs on that album, I agree. JONES: We believe the riff was the key. If you believe in that philosophy, then you’ll naturally start writing more memorable songs. The riff

takes precedence; it’s not about how fast I can play double bass, how fast I can play the blast beat. That was always my first thing: Is this the right beat for the riff? SEWAGE: The bulk of songs on Gore Metal were certainly written with the idea of being more memorable and catchy, though I can take little credit for that. Matt and Col were enjoying the second wave of thrash resurgence and wanted to bring that into Exhumed’s death metal. I pushed back, pointing at Exhumed’s previous catalog, as if that was some holy bar that we needed to be beholden to. Suffice to say, Matt and Col had been doing this just a bit longer than I, and had “matured” more than I had musically. I wanted nothing but twists and turns while they were ready to embrace the verse/chorus structure of traditional songwriting. I wanted song titles full of unpronounceable verbiage; they wanted “Necromaniac.” I accede now that the direction they wanted to go was totally correct. [Laughs] Hopefully, though, my contrarianism was helpful in some regards to keep the blend of thrash and death metal in good balance. JUNE 2024 : 4 6 : DECIBEL

like, “Come on, guys, we’re never going to get this in record stores.” I was like, “Okay, I guess that makes sense.” We wanted it to be a statement, like Black Metal—the Venom album, not the genre from Norway. Death metal by the mid’90s... [Obituary’s] World Demise, I guess it’s about pollution or whatever? I dunno, man, that’s not a knock on the record, [but] that doesn’t make me feel like, “Yeah! This is gonna piss off my parents! These guys hate toxic waste!” It’s like, come on, dude, what about rotting corpses and skewering people’s eyeballs and shit? So, we thought, let’s try to find something we can stand for. So “gore fucking metal” became that rallying cry. BEAMS: I didn’t know that. We used to tape that to the back of our guitars, and we’d raise our guitars and it would say “gore fucking metal.” We were on tour with Deicide and we were in Austin in front of a big crowd one time, and me and I believe Leon [del Muerte] at the time was playing bass—we were switching sides of the stage, so he switched his guitar, but I didn’t change the letters on mine, so it said “metal fucking metal.” I was like, “No one’s going to notice.” Right away, Col came up and was like, “You thought we wouldn’t notice, huh?” [Laughs] JONES: Venom’s Black Metal is so iconic, so we wanted to make it more like that, just Gore Metal. And probably at the time our moms probably had some influence there. If we were going to show our moms the record, it’d be easier to show it as Gore Metal than Gore F’ing Metal. If Venom would have called theirs Black F’ng Metal, I can guarantee you it would have been called Gore F’ing Metal. SEWAGE: I don’t recall that we wanted to call the album Gore Fucking Metal, but I could believe that Matt thought that was a good idea. [Laughs] The cover art is outrageous. It’s so low-budget and charming and over the top. Who put it together? HARVEY: Ross did the photography, so he deserves

probably 80 percent of the credit/blame. It was my kitchen; I had this roommate who I did not really care for, and I was planning on moving out within a couple months, so I was like, whatever, he can get as pissed as he wants. And then I sort of held the chainsaw. [Laughs] That was my contribution. But for a long time before the record, we used to do all this stuff at our shows where we’d have real pig blood that we’d spit on people and we’d spit live worms on people; we’d go to the Asian market where you can get the things that most Americans don’t eat, like tripe and intestines and brains and stuff, we’d bring all this out onstage and we’d get into gore food fights. But we backed off on it because we kept playing places and then never being allowed to return. [Laughs] It wasn’t like Watain

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where it’s like, “Huh, look at these guys, they’re so dark and edgy”; it was like, “You idiots, I now have to take apart the whole PA and clean it and don’t ever fucking come anywhere near my establishment again.” So, we dialed it back, but we were still very much of that mindset of incorporating as much real gore as possible. BEAMS: Oh, man. We borrowed a chainsaw from my brother. We totally trashed the place. We couldn’t clean all of the red-dyed corn syrup off from all the corners, it just got everywhere. We got pretty crazy with guts. The second time we did guts like that was with Slaughtercult, and I ended up getting E. coli 157 and almost dying. I was the only recorded case in our county for four months. We showed up with guts and stuff, we had all these plates out and were putting guts on plates, and I was putting guts in my mouth, just getting crazy and metal. The stupid thing is, I don’t think that’s what did it—I didn’t wash the plates, and a week later I ate off one of the plates and it had bacteria on it. Six days later, man, it felt like someone shot me in the stomach with a gun. For like three days, it was the worst. My doctor called me and was like, “You almost died, man. You almost died.” [Laughs] JONES: I was not there at that photo session. Everything that we have on our record covers we’ve bought from grocery markets. It’s all food. Really, all we’re doing is wasting food. SEWAGE: I recall the album cover being Matt and Col’s idea. At the time, I was forcefully inserting myself as executor of our various EP covers. I took nods from Voivod and Impetigo that a band’s members should be creative enough to make their own art and DIY it as much as possible, even if the results were sometimes less than ideal. We also didn’t have a budget to hire anyone, and I was the only member with a decent camera, so they were stuck with me. [Laughs]

the cuff and wasn’t supposed to happen, and that’s sort of the essence of the vibe we were going for. [Laughs] BEAMS: The chainsaw on the album was nowhere in comparison to the STIHL that we used [for the cover]. It was this little dinky chainsaw, this little tiny thing, man. I tried to borrow my brother’s STIHL for a tour; we were playing with Mayhem. Luckily, he was like, “You shouldn’t take this out.” He sent me off with this little gas-powered [chainsaw]. Which was fine, because Morbid Angel had fans onstage, and it blew my hair up in the air when I was doing the chainsaw, and it got into the engine and just totally yanked my hair. Our stage buddy that was helping us out on tour ran over with a knife and cut a big lock of hair out of this thing. If it was a really big engine, I would have had some scalp taken out. There was even a time where we went to Europe and I took a chainsaw with me on the plane. JONES: That’s such an extreme way to kill somebody, with a chainsaw. Exhumed does nothing on accident. Can you think of any other band that has a chainsaw on their cover? Razor. One of the best Canadian bands out there. Obviously, Razor influenced us there. It’s an instrument of death that’s really loud. A gunshot would be pretty weak. The sound of two knives? How do you put that on a record? But what if you put a chainsaw? It’s way more visceral. That’s how it came about. And because of Razor. In my human slaughterhouse  What do you mean I don’t get my security deposit back?!

The chainsaw samples are classic. Please tell me they’re actual recordings of you cranking up a chainsaw. HARVEY: It’s Ross cranking up the

chainsaw. On “Limb From Limb,” when he first tries to start it, then says “Fuck!” and starts it the second time, I remember listening to that in the control room, and Col and I looked at each other and we were like, “Yeah, we’re keeping that, that’s the take.” The one with the fuckup at the beginning, it’s very off JUNE 2024 : 4 8 : DECIBEL

SEWAGE: The chainsaw was an obvious choice for a horror movie nod, and I owned one that we used for photos and as an occasional stage prop. Then, as now, I’m terrible at firing up a chainsaw.

Then there’s the 2015 re-recording, Gore Metal: A Necrospective 1998-2015. Talk a bit about that. HARVEY: It started because we were driving back

from Florida after a tour where we had been unable to get into Canada. Then the engine in our van died. Because we had lost a bunch of money not getting into Canada, we really had no money to fix it. So, I had to call the label and be like, “I need an advance on something. We’ll get you guys something.” I kinda had it in my mind that I’d like to re-record the record anyway because I was not particularly happy with it. We could do it pretty cheaply and they should be able to make the money back and make some money towards the advance for the engine. Listening to the re-recordings, I think some of the songs sound way better and some of the songs really don’t work and I don’t understand why, and I don’t understand how we didn’t catch it while we were doing it.

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But the big positive of that was that we were able to get Ross involved with the re-recording. Because when the band started again [in 2010], I kind of had it in my mind that it would be great to mend fences with Ross and have him involved again in some way, but I didn’t really think it would be a possibility. Re-recording the album and getting him involved in that, then getting him out to sit in on a few shows, it just ended up opening the door for him to come back to the band and start working with us again. So, as much as some people really don’t care for the re-recording, which I get, it ended up being something super positive for the trajectory of the band going forward. BEAMS: I showed up, I did a couple solos and that was it. It was really bad. I showed up in Oakland, Ross was there. The studio was completely taped off—there was a crime scene investigation going on because there was a high-speed chase that ended right outside the studio. It was a total omen. I finally get into the studio and I think my guitar nut stripped, so I had to use this backup guitar I bought the night before, and I couldn’t get it in tune, and I come to find out after I get home that the locking nut was completely loose from the back. I didn’t know that. I couldn’t tune the guitar. I was having trouble doing the solos, I couldn’t figure stuff out, I was just not prepared. I was having trouble getting a tone. It was really bad. I know they were trying to clean it up with tempos, but... I wish I would have done better for that album. But I thought it was kind of boring compared to the original, even though it was more cohesive. SEWAGE: I think the re-recording is very good overall. Matt and [drummer] Mike Hamilton really honed in on the vibrant energy of the original musicianship while still updating the sound and performance to the level of a much more competent band. It’s as extreme as the original and still a fun listening experience. For my part, I was wavering my vocal performance between my own natural gutturals and the more mid-range gutturals of their then-current bassist/vocalist, Rob Babcock. That may have been a mistake, and I think I should have just stuck to my own lane. I don’t think I performed terribly, but after rejoining the band and recording a few records full-bore in my own style, my vocals on Gore Metal Redux feel a bit lackluster by comparison. JONES: I’m not a fan of bands re-recording and going back. I understood why Matt wanted to do it, and probably from this conversation you can understand why. It was okay. It doesn’t capture what the Gore Metal sound was. It didn’t really add to it. But I totally understand why he wanted to do it. When you’re not satisfied with something as a musician, it’s just going to eat away at you. For Matt to accept Gore Metal as it is

“Having an idea how to record that didn’t fit with reality is how you get Gore Metal. Sometimes it turns out to be a happy accident. I don’t think it turned out, though. Penicillin is something that was good that was an accident. Gore Metal is not penicillin.”

CO L JO NE S for other people, he just needed to redo it. Then he can accept Gore Metal as-is and wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed about it. It’s a way to make the original Gore Metal okay for him. As a fan, I don’t really care too much about the re-recording. I spun it once or twice and kinda forgot about it, to be frank. JONES: And that’s perfect. So, it served its job.

It’s not for you to forget about it; it’s for Matt to forget about it. What is Gore Metal’s legacy? HARVEY: On one hand, it’s not really for the

people in the band to measure that. All I can say is that, for better or for worse, as much as I’ve sort of had a semi-tortured relationship with that record [laughs], 25 years later, this is what I do. I play music. Without that record, I would not have been able to go on this circuitous and sometimes deeply depressing path that has led me to a place where I’m pretty much satisfied with where I’m at. JONES: Oh, don’t ask me that question. That’s so pretentious. If there’s any legacy, it’s this: It’s people like you talking to me saying they enjoyed it. Actually, I’d probably say there is no legacy because Exhumed’s still around. It’s a testament to the integrity of and the vision of a band that JUNE 2024 : 50 : DECIBEL

stuck to itself throughout its history, and you can’t say that about many bands. Look how awesome [2019’s] Horror was, right? Exhumed’s been really personal for me; that’s why I don’t do a lot of interviews. The band’s really always been about friendship and playing my favorite music with my best friend without regards to anything other than making what we feel what death metal should be. When people like Gore Metal, that just means that I understood the music and I got it right. BEAMS: A certain barbaristic approach to music. What Gore Metal leaves behind is another avenue in metal that people can drive faster on, I guess. [Laughs] People can get crazy and crash their cars, that’s the avenue. It leaves something gorier than anything with the approach. SEWAGE: Gore Metal’s legacy lives as a captured moment in time showcasing the sheer earnestness of a quartet of young lads attempting to capture absolutely every facet of what we loved most about metal onto one recording. Even though the road is bumpy and the driving inept, it’s a joyride to listen to. Everyone was striving to do their best, and as unpolished as our best efforts were, the eagerness is infectious. There’s a good number of perfect first albums out there, but there’s far fewer perfectly imperfect albums like Gore Metal.

Crypt Sermon’s

quest for heavy metal’s Holy Grail culminates on

THE STYGIAN ROSE

story by JOSEPH SCHAFER • photos by SCOTT KINKADE

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rowing up in a Catholic household in Bolivia means you had a Sepultura CD sitting on top of your family Bible in your nightstand,” says Enrique Sagarnaga. “If you went to someone selling music out of a kiosk outside and asked for the new Brujeria CD, they would look at you with wide eyes, shush you, and then check in the back. When you’re a kid trying to buy your first death metal CD, the fact that that was the guy’s reaction made it the coolest, most taboo experience in the world. ¶ “Fast forward a couple of years later. I’m in high school, in the thick of late teenage angst and depression, wanting to connect with something that’s beyond my surroundings. I’m listening to a copy of Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse for the first time at 4 a.m. ‘Into the Infinity of Thoughts’ kicks in, and I just let that song absolutely devastate me,” he remembers. “It opened my eyes and ears to an entirely new sound and purpose of music.”

Sagarnaga’s 4 a.m. revelation was his first taste of heavy metal’s forbidden fruit. It’s a shared experience among heavy metal adherents—a call to adventure. Sagarnaga heeded that call, even though it meant violating Bolivian social norms. That hero’s journey meant playing drums in Philadelphia epic doom crusaders Crypt Sermon. Sagarnaga and his bandmates, guitarists Steve Jansson and Frank Chin, bassist Matt Knox, keyboardist Tanner Anderson and vocalist Brooks Wilson, have been at the forefront of a renewed interest in traditional heavy metal in the United States for a decade. “This band is the romanticized spirit of the love for heavy metal,” the drummer says. “My artistic life is forever chasing that nostalgic feeling. The feeling you felt the first time you saw Iron Maiden on a T-shirt and said, ‘What the fuck is that and why do I love it?’ The feeling you felt you realized, ‘Holy shit, I’m listening to Satanic music. How do I feel about that when I’m living with my parents, who might fucking kill

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me for it?’ It almost felt dangerous, and I want to chase that feeling because it’s when I’ve felt the most alive.” Crypt Sermon pursued that feeling the way that the Arthurian figures that sometimes populate their songs pursued the Holy Grail. That pursuit took them proverbially to hell and back to create their masterful third album, The Stygian Rose.

SEEDS of DISSENT

The Major Arcana of the Tarot represents a hero’s journey, and the Major Arcana begins with The Fool—a person who can become anything, full of possibility. The possibility of Crypt Sermon’s existence began in 2008 when guitarist Steve Jansson played in a grindcore band called Unrest with Chris Grigg in the dank basements of West Philadelphia. In need of a bassist, the two met future Crypt Sermon vocalist Brooks Wilson at a party and recruited him to supply low-end and unclean singing.

Grigg put Unrest on the back burner to pursue his black metal project Woe, but Jansson and Wilson continued collaborating. They took part in short-lived projects, including a death metal band called Trenchrot, whose sole 2014 album, Necronomic Warfare, is a minor classic in the Bolt Thrower clone canon, partly thanks to Jansson’s vibrant soloing. If Crypt Sermon are modern metal’s Knights of the Round Table, then Jansson is King Arthur— one chosen to wield the blade from a young age. Like Sagarnaga, he had a chance encounter with metal that altered the trajectory of his life. “Growing up, [I remember] seeing a commercial for an Ozzy Osbourne best-of album that caught my ear. I eventually got the album, and listening to it is what really inspired me to pick up a guitar,” says Jansson. “Then my guitar teacher showed me Yngwie Malmsteen as well as the Shrapnel Records school of guitar: guys like Paul Gilbert, Jason Becker, etc. That had an enormous impact on me.” Deep death dorks are still clamoring for another Trenchrot LP, but by the time that band released music, Jansson and Wilson were already formulating Crypt Sermon. “We wanted to [play] doom metal more along the lines of Candlemass at the time,” says the former. Sabbathian bands were in vogue then, but Jansson’s mission was to counter the genre’s profligate stoner and sludge sub-variants: “Everything was about droning and fitting as many amps onto the stage as humanly possible, but there wasn’t a whole lot of emphasis on songwriting. It seemed everyone was very much into the whole Sleep and Electric Wizard thing at the time, and we just wanted to offer an alternative.” Wilson began as Crypt Sermon’s bassist, but the project called for clean singing, which he also took on. “I knew Brooks had sung before in various projects,” Jansson says. “He had

Early Iron Maiden speaks to me on an emotional level, versus clenching my teeth when I’m listening to Beneath the Remains, but I need both.

WITHOUT EACH, I CAN’T BREATHE. enrique SAGARNAGA

expressed interest in doing more rock-style singing. So I said, ‘Give it a shot’—and here we are.” Thanks to his history of singing gospel tunes in church, Wilson is a preternatural vocal talent with a potent chest voice. Journalists often liken him to Ronnie James Dio, and the comparison seems apt for once. By luck or destiny, Crypt Sermon found a drummer: Jansson’s old friend, Enrique Sagarnaga. “The way I joined Crypt Sermon was total serendipity,” Sagarnaga recalls. “I was hanging out with Steve while he was apartmentsitting for Brooks. I hadn’t seen Steve in a few years, and he had decided to get in touch after some scattered interactions on the internet. We ended up watching a Manowar DVD together. A short time later, I got a message from him asking if I had time to try my hand at a doomy project he had in mind. I admired his musical skill, and I decided to give it a try.” Alongside guitarist James Lipczynski, the quartet digitally released Demo MMXIII in June of that year, and the proof-of-concept proved popular enough to warrant a cassette release by Dark Descent Records, a label more famous for death metal than music with clean singing.

l e s FLEURS d u MAL

After adding bassist Will Mellor, Crypt Sermon recorded their debut full-length with now-ubiquitous producer Arthur Rizk in the summer of 2014. The following February, the band released Out of the Garden again via Dark Descent to

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immediate and surprising acclaim. The LP received adoring reviews and landed at #31 on Decibel’s Top 40 Albums of 2015 list—pretty good for a love letter to a subgenre on life support. “That record hit when all the bong and witch stuff was on the downslope, and there was a little resurgence of trad metal, I recall,” Jansson remembers. “We came right when that was about to get hot.” But Out of the Garden stands on its own merits. Anchored by certified bangers “Byzantium” and “Heavy Riders,” the record dutifully continues the medieval doom tradition laid out by Candlemass and Solitude Aeternus while incorporating more extreme elements—Jansson’s dexterous solos and Sagarnaga’s triplet-kick grooves. “My approach to the instrument is inspired by extreme drummers. I need to play drums in a way that keeps me engaged and satisfied with every effort I give,” Saganraga says. “Early Iron Maiden speaks to me on an emotional level, versus clenching my teeth when I’m listening to Beneath the Remains, but I need both. Without each, I can’t breathe.” Sagarnaga is Gawain, the knight who challenges the status quo; his drumming confronts the epic doom tradition with other possibilities. In retrospect, it’s the first hint at what Crypt Sermon would become. For Jansson, Out of the Garden was a showcase for songcraft, not shredding. “As I got older and better as a player technically, I started caring less about cramming as many notes as I could into one space and more about the song itself.

The guitar playing is just a piece of the puzzle. My technique and ability continued to grow along with my songwriting.” “I didn’t listen to that record for about nine years; then I listened to it a couple weeks ago,” says Jansson. “I appreciate its charm and idiosyncrasies more than I did before. Even though it’s a little rough around the edges, it’s got some good tunes.” Crypt Sermon hadn’t played live extensively before Out of the Garden. Still, the record was popular enough to land Crypt Sermon a handful of high-profile live gigs at Maryland Deathfest, Psycho Las Vegas, Hellfest, Wings of Metal and Decibel Metal & Beer Fest. By then, Mellor had departed, and the band enlisted Matt Knox, best known as a Horrendous guitarist, to play bass on that unexpected live success. By all accounts, each performance was well-received. “After the first song premieres, we played shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore,” says Wilson. “Before the album was even out, people knew our songs and were chanting the lyrics. That was pretty affirming.” Wilson’s background in hardcore punk attuned him to crowd participation, and he tries to maintain that spirit in Crypt Sermon. “[The music is] aimed at drawing the listener in and creating a connection,” he says. “We don’t get to play a lot, but playing live shaped how we want to be.” For better or worse, Crypt Sermon didn’t parlay the success of their contemporaries and peers into a quick and easy second record. “You’ve got to find your flow state,” Wilson reasons. “A lot of stuff happened between the first album and now that disrupted a lot of flow states, man.”

SEASONS in the ABYSS

Though live offers continued and demand for a second LP was high, logistical hurdles created the stereotypical “difficult” sophomore album experience for Crypt Sermon’s next effort, The Ruins of Fading Light. “We’re lucky that, in our rare instance, scarcity has bred demand because, as life would have it, I had my first kid the same year that our album came out,” says Wilson. He and Jansson are both teachers and, therefore, unable to take extended time off during the school year, which made live gigs difficult and touring all but impossible. In addition, Knox’s self-described “crazy” schedule forced him to step away. “Everyone’s personal life was going off in a bunch of different directions between Out of the Garden and The Ruins of Fading Light,” Jansson says. “Getting us all on the same page and in the same room regularly enough to get the momentum going was challenging. I’m sure some people think we’re just holed up in a practice space trying to carve some masterpiece, but it’s not like that at all. When we finally did get everyone rallied and ready to write, it took about a year and a half, roughly”.

alongside Sagarnaga, who likewise collaborated with Knox in the gothic black metal outfit The Silver. Wilson, with guidance from Anderson, delved into the world of synthesizers for his solo ambient endeavor, Dark Vestige. Lipczynski departed the band entirely.

pu rga tor y AFTERGLOW

In my mind, the new album is like IF NEVERMORE WROTE A KING DIAMOND ALBUM IN ANATHEMA’S REHEARSAL ROOM WHILE THEY WERE WRITING THE SILENT ENIGMA. Beneath the rumble of all of it, you can hear the bleed from the other rooms where mid-’80s 4AD bands like Dead Can Dance are rehearsing. tanner ANDERSON

One complicating factor was the band’s high internal standard for song quality. Jansson is a detail-oriented writer, but not a prolific one. “I don’t have hard drives of music or albums the way some people do,” he says. “Some people can just crank shit out, and even some of it is really high quality. But for me, writing can be an agonizing process because I mull over everything to the point of it being extremely counterproductive sometimes.” “He’s very much a perfectionist when it comes to songwriting,” agrees Knox. “He’s almost physically unable to show people his ideas if they’re not formulated and hammered out, and because of that, they’re always airtight when they make it to the practice space.” Eventually, Jansson asked his friend Frank Chin to play bass. Chin lived in the house where Crypt Sermon rehearsed and was well-known for his work in the sci-fi thrash outfit Vektor. Vektor had disbanded half a year earlier, and Chin was a free agent. “When Steve approached me, I was already a fan of their music and had hung out with them a bunch at the old practice space,” Chin says. “I didn’t really try out. Joining was a matter of picking it up and doing it. We’ve been friends for so long, it was an easy transition”. Chin joined Crypt Sermon near the tail end of the long, trying writing process—he wrote the bass parts after the songs were otherwise completed and had little time to get comfortable with them before recording. “Even though I was on it and I was a part of the process, I feel

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apart from it,” he admits. “On the second one, there was pressure to be bigger, more epic, over the top. It was a really big idea executed under hectic, not ideal conditions. I’m not going to say I don’t care about it. But compared to some of the other albums I’ve been involved with, it doesn’t rank high up there.” Chin isn’t an outlier among his bandmates. Conducting interviews for this article, various members of Crypt Sermon called their second record “bloated.” Not that listeners at large agreed with them: The Ruins of Fading Light was greeted with rosy reviews and ranked #4 on Decibel’s Top 40 Albums of 2019 list. On The Ruins of Fading Light, Crypt Sermon wrestle with the conventions of the epic doom genre they earlier championed. Wilson explored his range as a singer, employing occasional growls and indulging in vocal harmonies. The band embellished their compositions with organs and synthesizers. They tapped Tanner Anderson of medieval black metal outfit Obsequiae to contribute folk instrumentation to its titular finale. The overall effect evokes Phil Spector’s wall of sound. At its best, such as on the Jansson-penned centerpiece “The Snake Handler,” Ruins presents a bold, lush, progressive and articulate vision of epic doom’s past and potential future at once. At its worst, it’s two instrumental interludes back-to-back. The Ruins of Fading Light left Crypt Sermon splintered. After a handful of supporting shows, the band went dormant. Jansson and Chin refocused efforts on their black-thrash project, Daeva,

The middle of the Major Arcana includes cards like the Devil, the Hanged Man and the Tower, which often signify downfall, upheaval and trying times. The time leading up to Crypt Sermon’s third album tested their mettle as much as The Ruins of Fading Light did. “We all went through a really hard time, and we weren’t sure what the outcome was going to be,” Chin says. “This is a really personal record because we weren’t sure if it was going to happen or not.” But there are no evil tarot cards. Even the Tower has a positive connotation: necessary but painful change, and pain is a powerful motivator. “One of the main writers was gone at that point, and I took home the bulk of the music department, which kind of put a chip on my shoulder,” Jansson says. “Because of whatever marginal success this band has, I felt a constant need to one-up everything. I always feel the need to one-up everything I do.” “We wanted to refresh everything and start doing new songs. At the same time, Daeva was finishing our first record, so everything was super slow-moving,” says Chin. Crypt Sermon called on two allies from the benighted Ruins days to repopulate their garrison. The band considered asking Knox to rejoin on second guitar, but Chin insisted on taking the spot. “Steve called me to talk about asking Matt to play guitar,” says Chin. “I thought, ‘If we’re going to be looking, well, I’ve been writing songs on guitar for the band already, and I wanted to play my guitar riffs on the record.’ I told him, ‘I’m gonna take it on.’” Instead, they recruited Knox to play bass. “Me being a crazy person who has no time, I said yes,” Knox explains. He agreed in part out of a desire to leave a recorded impression on the Crypt Sermon catalog. “While filling in, I had learned a couple of songs for their second record, but I didn’t play on it. This time, I was making sure I was on the record. I felt the same way as Frank going into this on guitar: I was excited to be on record playing bass, specifically since it isn’t my primary instrument.” Knox and Chin, then, are Gallahad and Pervical, the newest knights whose outside perspective and energy are needed to attain the grail. They also approached Anderson to contribute as a traditional producer—someone to offer feedback, steer overall direction and provide technical wisdom. Anderson agreed, understanding that this record would differ from its predecessor.

Records coming out now have a tongue-in-cheek aspect, like a caricature, a costume that’s put on and taken off afterward. It’s a circus. When I hear The Stygian Rose,

THERE’S NO CIRCUS THERE. matt KNOX

“My first and favorite instruction from Steve was, ‘We don’t want this to be like The Ruins of Fading Light—none of that flute hurdy-gurdy shit,’” Anderson chuckles. He had been consulting with Wilson on the finer points of granular synthesis—but he’s also a font of guitar compositions and contributed riffs to augment Jansson’s deliberative writing process. In our Arthurian analogy, Anderson is Merlin, the wise master whose guidance makes Arthur a better leader. “Being the wizard he is, Tanner would send these riff graveyards, files full of things that he thought would be cool for Crypt Sermon,” Jansson says. “One of the first things he sent was the opening riff to ‘Thunder (Perfect Mind).’ When I heard it, I thought, ‘God, he knows how to do this band better than I do.’ “I would use many of his ideas as jumping-off points for starting songs, which helped get the ball rolling,” Jansson continues. “In a way, he resuscitated the band—or at least planted the seeds for some inspiration.” Organically, Anderson’s role grew from advisor to colleague—he became the band’s sixth member, a dedicated keyboardist. “Brooks was doing a lot of synth stuff and incorporating that more and more into the songs,” Jansson says. “Tanner also happens to be really good in that department. We all agreed that Brooks should be able to focus on singing and fronting the band rather than playing synth as well, and we all agreed that Tanner’s input would be crucial.”

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Crypt Sermon began circulating digital demos, often recorded at Wilson’s house, for input and interpolation. Anderson added synthesizers to the in-progress compositions rather than leaving them for last. Each member describes the writing process as collaborative and democratic, an authentic Round Table. Most members had trouble describing which riffs in the final record were theirs originally. Finally, in the spring of 2022, the five Philly-based members began rehearsing the songs that would become The Stygian Rose. “The first songs we jammed together were the opening track, ‘Glimmers in the Underworld,’ and ‘Scrying Orb,’” Chin says. “It was exciting to play those songs on guitar and Matt on bass. I thought, ‘He’s crushing it—this was a good plan.’ After those songs, everyone had an endorphin rush. We knew we’d have to keep going.” With momentum reestablished, Jansson refocused Crypt Sermon on memorable songcraft. “It could be my age, but things don’t pull me in the way they used to when I was a teenager, and I hate it,” he confesses. “That’s not to say there aren’t things that pull me in, and there aren’t a lot of great albums coming out. Replay value is huge for me. I like an album that makes me want to listen to it again as soon as it’s over, and one of my biggest goals was to create an album I would want to listen to repeatedly. Making an all-killer-no-filler album is very difficult.” “Every song has got to be able to stand on its own. They can’t blow by you,” agrees Wilson. “Take some random band on a huge Euro metal

label; the songs are all the highest-impact guitar playing, but fairly barebones lyric quality. I’m all for a great chorus, but these are hardly tunes at all. There’s a definite difference with Crypt Sermon’s approach. We’re bombastic, but we’re more concerned with putting the melody in your ear and getting you to come back over and over.” Putting his money where his mouth is, Wilson made a concerted effort to sound less like a stereotypical doom singer and de-emphasize the ever-present harmonies on The Ruins of Fading Light. This time, he wanted straightforward melodies delivered by emotional singing. “I want to buy an album where the title is generally speaking the chorus on most songs. It’s important to have statement music.” The band took a near-total social media break from 2022 through 2023 to facilitate that statement and kept their updated lineup a secret. Wilson organized the narrative spine that underpins The Stygian Rose during this almost monastic retreat.

u nde r world USA

It’s unsurprising that The Stygian Rose is a concept album. What’s surprising is that Crypt Sermon didn’t attempt one earlier. Their previous albums lack clear narratives, but lay down a thematic framework that Wilson is still exploring. “When I write lyrics to a Crypt Sermon album, I’m thinking not only of what each song is about. The album as a whole is set in an aesthetic time period,” says Wilson, who authors all of Crypt Sermon’s lyrics and paints their album covers. “The first album was set in late antiquity. The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance are reflected in the Arthurian Legend feel of the second album.” On The Stygian Rose, Wilson shifted his focus from Europe to the United States. “Two things I wanted to accomplish were setting the new album aesthetically in America and thematically in early American spiritualism,” says Wilson. “Early American spiritualism led me to a character named Paschal Beverly Randolph, who opened up my whole world about what kind of character from whose perspective I could write.” Randolph’s story is unique, fascinating and too long to relate here fully. He was an 1800s medical doctor and multidisciplinary occultist who ran in the same circles as historic mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky. He called himself America’s first Rosicrucian and is likely the continent’s first sex magician. For the non-pervs out there, sex magic is the practice of using sex acts during ritual spiritual activities—Randolph’s innovations in this field influenced ubiquitous occultist Aleister Crowley (yes, that Mr. Crowley). Randolph seems like a modern man projected backward in time: He lectured in favor of birth control, though it was illegal, and saw gender as “provincial” (read: optional). He also advocated for the use of cannabis. “He checks all my cool guy boxes,” Wilson says.

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Randolph’s story is also quintessentially American: He was a free black man born during the age of slavery who lived to see its abolition. He established the country’s first Rosicrucian fraternity in San Francisco and moved its headquarters to Quakertown, PA—essentially Crypt Sermon’s home turf. To continue the Arthurian metaphor, Wilson is Crypt Sermon’s Lancelot: the romantic. In his hands, Randolph’s story becomes a concept album, both haunted and lovelorn. The protagonist is an amalgamation of the historical Randolph and elements of Wilson’s own experience, who chases the elusive spirit of a phantom lover into the underworld. Wilson grew up indoctrinated in an Evangelical church, and the arc of Crypt Sermon’s three albums mirror his exit from Christianity and subsequent scholarly occult practice. “Christianity is embedded in my life,” he says. “I spend all my extra time reading about the history of Christianity as a result of falling out of faith.” On Out of the Garden, the band interpreted the Maddox Brothers and Rose’s country gospel standard “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.” On The Ruins of Fading Light, Wilson is credited as “Reverend Wilson.” He’s an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church and has performed Crypt Sermon sets in ceremonial vestments. These choices have erroneously led some listeners to call Crypt Sermon a Christian metal band. Wilson acknowledges, “I painted myself into a corner focusing on specifically Christianity.” Writing a concept album moved Wilson out of that corner. “I was able to step outside [of] being Brooks. I’m romantically satisfied in a way the character is not. I can have some longing, but in my real life, I fill that psychological satisfaction by reading countless PDFs of esoteric stuff,” he laughs, adding, “So much of my extracurricular time is spent reading old weird texts in tiny print that it doesn’t even feel weird anymore.” Wilson’s time spent in digital file trenches pays off on The Stygian Rose. Each song explores a plot point and particular occult technique, including summoning demons from the Seventh Key of Solomon in “Heavy Is the Crown of Bone” to Enochian orb scrying in the aptly titled “Scrying Orb.” Wilson isn’t the only practitioner in Crypt Sermon. During interviews, Sagarnaga, Anderson and Knox linked their enthusiasm for mystic texts with playing music. “My philosophy on occultism is that while a lot of people will tell you it’s about devil worship, the real appeal is a greater understanding of the world around you,” Sagarnaga says. “My aspirations are just to get an understanding of the space between the stars. The closest glimpses I’ve had with something that feels bigger than me is making this music.” Not every member of Crypt Sermon is a committed occultist. “Dude, I’m just a Cro-Magnon in the corner with a guitar,” Jansson jokes before

• J U N E 2024 • D E C I B E L 62 : SEPTEMBER 2023 : DECIBEL

voicing total support for Wilson’s conceptual and lyrical direction. “He’s got a clearer vision of it. I look at it like being on a sports team; my job in the band is to deliver and tighten things sonically, and the conceptual stuff I entrust to Brooks.”

EPIC ( wha t is it?)

This conceptual, magical and technical mindmeld produced Crypt Sermon’s most stylistically diverse album. Wilson’s narrative impresses, but the enduring story of The Stygian Rose may be Crypt Sermon’s liberation from the rigid confines of their original sound. “As the band reformed fully with a steady lineup, other influences crept in,” Knox says. “There was more inspiration in the air and a desire to step outside of what we’d done. It was like something else was calling us.” The anthemic stomping from Out of the Garden and the atmospheric detail of The Ruins of Fading Light remain, but arena-sized riffs and choruses join them on “Down in the Hollow” and “Thunder (Perfect Mind).” Syncopated breakdowns reminiscent of technical death metal anchor “Heavy Is the Crown of Bone.” Peacevillian synthesizers add color to “Scrying Orb” and the title track. “There’s a part of me that struggles with labeling this as a doom metal record,” says Sagarnaga about the album’s stylistic breadth. All right, so if it’s not doom, then what is it? “It feels to me like some of the weirder explorations that were happening in the mid to late ’90s,” agrees Knox. “Not in the sense that it sounds like those bands, but in the philosophy of groping for something different while still existing in the metal world. There’s a life that the ’90s stuff lacked because it was fighting against its own death. This is a more clear-headed path going forward where those bands were perhaps lost.” “One big frame of reference for me was the Nevermore album Dreaming Neon Black,” says Jansson. “That record has a very big, heavy, dark vibe that I like and that no bands have captured since. There was a very specific sound from that time period that came and went quickly. Not many people have tapped into or expanded on it, or at least that I’m aware of or noticed.” “In my mind, the new album is like if Nevermore wrote a King Diamond album in Anathema’s rehearsal room while they were writing The Silent Enigma.” agrees Anderson. “Beneath the rumble of all of it, you can hear the bleed from the other rooms where mid-’80s 4AD bands like Dead Can Dance are rehearsing.” Not all in the Crypt Sermon camp reject their old genre tag. “You can still call us an epic doom band, but you have to rely on what each of those words means,” Wilson says. “When you associate ‘epic,’ ‘doom’ and ‘metal’ with bands that are playing at a certain tempo, use of certain scales, are limited in presentation, and use lyrical themes that are fairly restricted, then it stops being epic because the landscape is already trodden.”

To Wilson, “epic” describes the emotional depth of a story and the scope of its scenario, and The Stygian Rose covers much ground in both aspects of that definition. “Epic doesn’t mean that limited, liminal, intimate spaces can’t exist. Those spaces exist on this album in ways they didn’t before.” In a sense, this is a return to not form, but substance. Ten years ago, Crypt Sermon surveyed the doom landscape, found it wanting, and set off in a different direction. Today, The Stygian Rose surveys the new traditional metal army they rode at the vanguard of and peels away again. “A lot of the heavy metal revival acts right now aren’t good,” Knox says. “They’re trying to recreate a time and place with a level of authenticity that can’t be approached again. People hear Screaming for Vengeance and think that it was just guys having fun. Well, that’s not what it was. That was the most powerful they could sound when they were making it. Records coming out now have a tongue-in-cheek aspect, like a caricature, a costume that’s put on and taken off afterward. It’s a circus. When I hear The Stygian Rose, there’s no circus there.”

the HOLY GRAIL

The last few cards of the Tarot are the sun, moon, stars and the world: the Celestial arcana. It’s not clear that Crypt Sermon have kissed the stars or understand the space between them yet, but the sky is in sight right now. However, the band’s journey may lead them back into between-record limbo; many factors that kept them off the road and out of the studio remain. “There are things we have to mitigate in life: taking care of children and being with our families,” Sagarnaga says. “We take pride in the work that we do, which means that we have jobs that we don’t want to lose over going on a big tour. We’re aware of these limitations, but nothing that we’ve done in the past is conventional. So why even pay attention to traditional ways of touring and presenting yourself?” Ever the romantic, Wilson sees the possibility for more frequent and more creative Crypt Sermon releases in the future, even if they don’t please doom traditionalists. “We accept that we can’t make everyone happy,” Wilson says. “Out of the Garden was a starting point, and that title was given to it for that very reason. It was only going to get bigger from there, faster, less restricted. From here, with this lineup, we can do whatever we want.” That future music may not resemble The Stygian Rose. Each Crypt Sermon album is a reaction to, and correction of, its predecessor. But just as the Holy Grail is only a cup—its contents are what matters—records are a vessel for the core identity of a band of musicians. “Crypt Sermon will always sound like Crypt Sermon,” Anderson says definitively. “Brooks’ voice is too powerful. Steve’s riffs are too triumphant. That’s just how it is.”

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27/03/2024 17:15

DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 63

INSIDE ≥

66 ACCEPT God bless ya 66 DEICIDE On brand

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

70 NOCTURNUS AD No longer limited to thrashing where they’re at 70 KERRY KING Reborn of fire 74 PALLBEARER Heavy mental

Mason Killing Capacity

JUNE

GATECREEPER’s efficient approach takes their stadium death metal one step closer to arena death metal

Full of hell

Friends of hell

Full of friends

Full of friends of hell

erhaps it was inevitable that Gatecreeper, the New Wave of Old School Death Metal’s most GATECREEPER devoted HM-2 worshippers, would eventually release Dark Superstition their Wolverine Blues. The clues were there. 2019’s Deserted NUCLEAR BLAST boasted the Arizona band’s punchiest, catchiest songs up to that point, and Side A of their pandemic stopgap An Unexpected Reality trimmed their already sinewy death metal down to a string of minute-long hardcore rippers. (Side B’s 11-minute death/doom detour, “Emptiness,” isn’t quite as instructive for our purposes, but it’s worth remembering that it absolutely fucking rules.) ¶ So, the hard-rocking directness of Dark Superstition shouldn’t come as a total surprise, but its ruthless effectiveness might turn heads. After establishing themselves as masters of a certain strain of old-school worship, Gatecreeper have made their best album yet by radically streamlining their vision. ¶ Entombed have long loomed over Gatecreeper as a primary influence, and Wolverine Blues will always be

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 65

the go-to reference for Swedeath gone death ‘n’ roll. But Dark Superstition probably has more in common with Dismember’s 1995 pivot, Massive Killing Capacity. That’s thanks in part to the presence of Fred Estby. The Dismember drummer and bandleader flew to the Grand Canyon State to help Gatecreeper get the songs across the finish line. Usually, when a Swedish songwriter comes to America to help an artist polish up their material before heading into the studio, that songwriter is Max Martin, and the artist is a pop star. Gatecreeper’s willingness to invite Estby into their process highlights their humility, creative openness and drive to be the best band they can be. Elite athletes train with their heroes so that they might someday surpass them. Why shouldn’t metal musicians? As for Estby, the guru role becomes him. His fingerprints are all over the tank-sized grooves of “Caught in the Treads” and the dark melodicism of “Dead Star” and “Superstitious Vision.” Elsewhere, Gatecreeper dabble in sounds from further outside their wheelhouse. “Flesh Habit” is built around a bouncing Sisters of Mercy bassline that merges with a midtempo buzzsaw riff, forging a rarely explored connection between goth-rock pomp and death metal muscle. “Tears Fall From the Sky,” the only track on the album that exceeds pop-song length at almost six minutes, injects dark veins of regal, almost Maiden-esque melody into its doomy framework. (Guitarists Eric Wagner and Israel Garza meet up in glorious harmony throughout Dark Superstition, in one of the album’s best nods to Dismember.) Atop it all is Chase Mason, a onetime pupil in the John Tardy school of smeared, indecipherable death grunts. He’s graduated to a subtly more intelligible—but no less unhinged—vocal style here. It’s a canny choice, one that helps bring out the earwormy infectiousness the band worked hard to infuse into these songs. Gatecreeper have never toiled at the extreme end of their genre, but on Dark Superstition, the writing and performances have fully caught up to their longstanding “stadium death metal” sensibility. —BRAD SANDERS

Humanoid N A PA L M

Less human than human

Let’s be honest—the best part of Accept in 2024 is guitarist Wolf Hoffmann, who’s been doing this now for 40-plus years, and (IMO) is one of the most underrated guitarists in metal, especially as a soloist. But surrounded by a supporting cast 66 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

that capably play his songs and a singer (Mark Tornillo) who capably sounds like original vocalist Udo Dirkschneider, what you get from Accept in 2024 ain’t great. Tornillo’s vocals are fine, but his lyrics are cringe-worthy (or “cringe” as the kids say). And, as opposed to previous platter Too Mean to Die, none of these songs really catch the ear in a significant way. You can nod your head to all of them, but probably not a one will generate a notion to hit repeat. As evidenced by any number of great latecareer albums from the likes of Satan, Diamond Head, Saxon, Judas Priest, Maiden and others, it’s definitely possible for legacy bands to stay relevant without dramatically changing their sound. You just have to write better songs than the ones on Humanoid. This is un-Acceptable. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

ANCST

Culture of Brutality LIFEFORCE

Sounds like chit, mang

The sixth song on this, the fifth record from this crusty, grinding, black-metalling German entity, is entitled “Destination Nowhere,” and starts with a sample of someone saying, “There’s a void inside of me, you and everyone… an endlessness, and everything you collect, every success and everything you’d take to shrink that void down, none of it works.” Combining song title and soliloquy makes a salient point about depression, emptiness and mental anguish. It also, sadly, encapsulates the depth, power and effectiveness—or lack thereof—of Culture of Brutality. What hits first is how paper-thin the sound here is. The drums in particular putter around powerlessly as multi-instrumentalist and lone member Tom Schmidt plies his trade on what sounds like Tupperware containers stuffed with wet rice. The guitars do their best to force energy drinks down the throat of Heaven Shall Burn, Caliban and Rotten Sound, and there are healthy handfuls of decent-to-above average riffs and songs (“Teeth Into Flesh,” “Damaged Goods,” “Doing Your Part”), but Schmidt apparently plugged his guitar into a box of Kleenex instead of the slabs of meat ‘n’ concrete required to legitimize his teetering between the brutality of the genres he chooses to toy with. The emptiness is especially exposed when he slows down for “Edge of Reason”’s loping southern rock/Pantera thing. That his vocals dominate the mix to an obnoxious end is yet another strike in the con column, which is a shame because there are great deep cuts in the form of “Beneath These Hills of Iron,”

“Negativity Bias” and “Whiteboard Criminal” that the featherweight sonics make difficult to listen to. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

DÅÅTH

The Deceivers M E TA L B L A D E

We Dååth think you protest an appropriate amount

After spending more than a decade on ice, Atlanta’s Dååth rumbled back to life in 2023, releasing a string of five singles. For metalheads of a certain vintage, this resurrection came with a hit of nostalgia. Fifteen years ago, Dååth briefly felt ubiquitous. They were perennial openers on midsize metal tours throughout the latter half of the aughts, playing with Cattle Decapitation, Dying Fetus, Chimaira and the Acacia Strain. I saw them at Ozzfest in 2007, and then again on my Senior Skip Day in 2009, with DragonForce and Cynic. They were one of those bands that was always just kind of around, until they weren’t. Well, they’re back, with a new lineup flanking founding guitarist Eyal Levi and longtime vocalist Sean Zatorsky. The original iteration of Dååth wasn’t quite a metalcore band, but they orbited the genre, including plenty of detuned, chugging, red meat riffage in their proggy melodeath songs. The Deceivers focuses more intently on the tech-y, virtuosic aspects of the Dååth sound. That’s evident before you hear a note by looking at the guest appearances on the album: Archspire’s Dean Lamb, Periphery’s Mark Holcomb, ex-Nevermore shredder Jeff Loomis and more. The problem with The Deceivers isn’t necessarily that it goes all in on virtuosity. There’s a place for shredding solos and twitchy djent parts. There’s even a place for the album’s wispy, digital symphonic parts, in a “Hey, remember when Dimmu Borgir were on Headbangers Ball?” kind of way. The issue is with the songs themselves, which are unimaginative canvases for the band’s stockpile of window dressing. The actual bones of the riffs don’t come with much meat on them, and you’d be hard-pressed to remember a melody from the album when it finishes. All the extra stuff they layer on is impressive, but Dååth need to freshen up the fundamentals. —BRAD SANDERS

DEICIDE

Banished by Sin REIGNING PHOENIX

Faith restored

Slapping AI-generated “artwork” on a record that contains music of a very high standard is the

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equivalent of a beautiful model smiling while revealing a mouthful of shit-encrusted misshapen teeth. For those of us who still cherish records in their physical guise, Deicide’s choice of bland digital visual is blasphemous in a new way. Notwithstanding the limp aesthetics, however, Deicide are in hell-summoning form throughout Banished by Sin—startlingly so; the music therein is easily the most engaging they’ve written since 2006’s The Stench of Redemption or even 1997’s Serpents of the Light. It’s not just enough to have Glen Benton’s God-shattering gutturals/shrieks primed and the devilish cadence of his rhythmic delivery dragging you right back to those profane, genuinely frightening early records—which they do—the musicianship needs to match his reborn intensity. With Benton’s lifelong partner in impious attacks, drummer/songwriter Steve Asheim, tightening his interplay with Kevin Quirion (guitars since 2011) and showcasing incredible chemistry with new-blood guitarist Taylor Nordberg, Deicide have entered a new era of Christian bloodlust. Who would have thought at this stage of their existence, and after nearly 20 years of simply solid albums, that we would have a Deicide LP that could potentially stand beside their Roadrunner classics? Well, it’s here and it’s relentlessly great, from the crucifying thrash of opener “From Unknown Heights You Shall Fall” and the insidiously catchy “Sever the Tongue” to the billowing hellfire of “Bury the Cross… With Your Christ,” the spine-jolting punkish power of the title track and the infernal decrees of closer “The Light Defeated.” —DEAN BROWN

EVERGREY

Theories of Emptiness N A PA L M

Ever consistent, ever great

Perhaps it’s because they’ve always flirted more with the more mainstream side of metal than the more death-inclined sounds of their ’90s Gothenburg peers, but Evergrey have never been privy to the same kind of recognition that At the Gates and In Flames received in North America. Sure, their output has been more uneven—just look at their album artwork over the decades—but recently Evergrey settled into a comfortable groove that’s yielded some of their finest music. They know their strengths—seamlessly blending gothic metal melancholy with infectious, bombastic vocal melodies—and have dutifully stuck to them on such recent standouts as 2014’s Hymns for the Broken, 2021’s Escape of the Phoenix and 2022’s A Heartless Portrait (The Orphean Testament). 68 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

Evergrey’s 14th album, Theories of Emptiness, not only continues that positive trend, but just might be the band’s best work at the end of a very productive decade. The light-and-dark dynamic approaches the majesty of gothic doom kings Katatonia, tracks like “Falling From the Sun” and “We Are the North” leaning harder toward the heavier side of the band’s meter. Guitarist/singer/songwriter Tom S. Englund is in splendid vocal form throughout, knowing when to crank up the melodrama (potential hit “Misfortune”) and when to dial it back and let the mood carry the moment (“Ghost of My Hero”), resulting in a spellbinding, riveting record. Best of all is the adventurous “Cold Dreams,” in which Englund partners with Katatonia’s Jonas Renkse and Englund’s own daughter Salina on a prog-leaning epic that’s as contemplative as it is thrilling. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

FRIENDS OF HELL

God Damned You to Hell RISE ABOVE

Friends in low places

Pandemic creativity yielded as promised, more or less. Driven by art more than commerce, practitioners worked their passions unencumbered by time and space since COVID halted both. International conglomerate Friends of Hell no doubt pledged their Lucifugian allegiance remotely given their venomous 2020 bow, all O.G. witchcraft and horror, so follow-up God Damned You to Hell coheres better even as plague motivation abates. Finnish bassist Taneli Jarva and Greek drummer Tas Danazoglou originally formed FOH with Barcelona tattoo empiricist-cum-guitarist Jon Diaz and second Finn Sami Hynninen, whose vintage voicings lent the quartet’s eponymous LP an earnest coarseness. With singer and Spaniard now gone, Swedish vocalist Per Gustavsson of black thrashers Nifelheim slots in alongside a pair of axe-grinders: Armando da Silva, moonlighting off blackened Brazilian death occultists Mystifier, and Cypriot stringer Nikolas Moutafis from power fantasy metallers Solitary Sabred. Upping production and amplification, the retooled quintet crackles pleasingly sulphuric. Clock striking 12, the opening title track grounds up mortar-to-pestle doom, guitars growling and gushing forth a ’70/’80 classicism of neck piston-ing rhythm and lightning rod solos. Gustavsson, meanwhile, gleefully incants sardonic pompousness from ye olde Book of Satan. “Gran Inquisitor” revs, pounds and spirals into screams as “Bringer of Evil” whiffs Priest and Birmingham dirge “Snakes Not Sons” name-drops fellow townies Sabbath.

“Ave Satanatas” arouses symbiotic shredding in down-tuned sympathy, ultimately spelling the monotony of mono-thematic subject matter. By the back end, no deviation in plod and a void in deviant musicality wear down into Spinal Tap (“Cross Inverter”). Neither does the sophomore effort possess anything as hooky as the debut’s “Into My Coffin.” God Damned You to Hell thus paves less than perdition. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

FULL OF HELL

Coagulated Bliss C LO S E D CA S K E T

The noise knows

Full of Hell have participated in so many collaborative releases, splits and side projects to go along with their own streak of releases that to assume Coagulated Bliss would not be a collision of styles, feels, moods, sounds and experiences would be ridiculous. Not Alestorm-singing-about-pirates-fromSaskatchewan ridiculous, but pretty ridiculous. Four songs in and any doubt that the Maryland/Pennsylvania-based blast furnace was putting up blinders to boundaries is tossed out the window like a Putin-refutin’ Russian. Noise rock, black and death metal, post-punk hardcore eeriness, whatever it is that the Melvins have been doing for 40 years and the gentlemanly side of Gary Numan are spit-roasted over a fire started by SLAB!, all highlighted and employed in an increasingly kitchen sink songwriting style. And the adventurous, exploratory streak doesn’t stop once the album’s initial third comes to an end; Coagulated Bliss keeps spreading its wings. What Full of Hell have managed is how to keep things memorable, regardless of what sort of foreign serum they inject into their own spiky broth or how nerve-gratingly harsh they make things. See “Half Life of Changelings,” the title track and “Vacuous Dose” for friendly lessons in proto-punk violence, “Bleeding Horizon” for career moments in doom, “Fractured Bonds to Mecca” for a salute to early Laibach and “Schizoid Rupture” to hear death/thrash through the veil of streetwise grime. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

KAWIR

Kydoimos SOULSELLER

Grecian Formula 2024

With Rotting Christ obsessively exploring realms of atmospheric bombast on Pro Xristou, their Grecian black metal compatriots in Kawir continue to take the more direct, bloody path on their new record—and ninth overall—Kydoimos. Like its predecessors, Kydoimos is steeped in the rich

DECIBEL : JUNE 2024 : 69

Magus opus | P R O F O U N D L O R E

Nocturnus AD drummer/vocalist Mike Browning’s multi-layered Dr. Magus concept finds new chapters in Unicursal, the musical and thematic follow-up to 2019’s admirable Paradox. To that end, the Floridians’ regressive/progressive tilt is the hyperdimensional successor to 1990’s landmark The Key, but not entirely. That was the allure of Paradox, actually: It was neither nostalgic nor futuristic, but somehow caught in between—“Seizing the Throne,” “The Return of the Lost Key” and “The Bandar Sign” were prime. Browning’s storytelling reads much like Charles Stross if musically illustrated with the aesthetics of Event Horizon. There are, naturally, references to H.P. Lovecraft, too. Opener, “The Ascension Throne of Osiris,” is awash with oblique aggression, swirling keyboards and wicked, sometimes metagalactic solos. Guitarists Belial Koblak and Demian Heftel (both ex-After Death)

have settled well into their roles as cosmic noisemakers against Browning’s thrashy mash and keyboardist Josh Holdren’s Michael Kamenlike haunts. They convincingly ramp down on Unicursal’s midder-tempo tracks, “Mesolithic,” “Hod, the Stellar Light” and the album’s endcap, “Netzach, the Fire of Victory.” Here, Nocturnus AD are more than just frenzy, which, in a strange twist of fate, feels like the album Pestilence never released between Consuming Impulse and Testimony of the Ancients. The production is quintessential Nocturnus. Jarrett Pritchard, who’s done work for Goatwhore and the remaster of Ripping Corpse’s classic debut, handles the material with old-world charm. Unicursal has the warm fuzziness of a book of unknown provenance found on a shelf in delightful decay, and it’s not annoyingly overloud—the volume tricks on the goopy drip-drop intro to “CephaloGod” made for a surprising jolt. After nearly 40 years, Browning still iterates sidereal fantasies with commendable consistency. —CHRIS DICK

mythology of the 1993-formed band’s homeland; its title is named after the Ancient Greek daimon of war, who is referenced in Homer’s The Iliad. “Teiresias,” “Fields of Flegra” and “Centauromachy” make for a raucous opening trifecta, with battle-ready horns beckoning the listener during the album’s opening moments, giving way to a turbulent tremolo ‘n’ blast tandem aided by Porphyrion’s coruscating screams. While the latter track’s riffs construct regal architecture, the keyboards—a time-tested feature of Greek BM—accentuate the opulence without smothering the arrangement. This instrumental classiness paired with rabid fervor has made Hellenic extreme metal so intoxicating in the right hands. Some might say that Rotting Christ have pushed the atmospheric elements too far, to the detriment of their extreme roots. However, Kawir, like the more melodic Yoth Iria, strike compositional/stylistic balance with thunderous force. “Achilles & Hector”

and “Achilles Funeral” are a testament to such mastered dynamism. From scalding BM surges to towering mid-paced marches, replete with spoken word (courtesy of tenor Ilias Zervas), both tracks act as a microcosm of Kawir’s exotic sound. When drawing upon ancient myth and legend, the music needs to be equally theatrical and grandiose while remaining archaic. Kawir intrinsically understand this, and that’s why they’re still at the top tier of Mediterranean black metal three decades on. —DEAN BROWN

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KERRY KING

From Hell I Rise REIGNING PHOENIX

KK’s Slayer

As promised, on his first solo album Slayer guitarist Kerry King doesn’t venture too far afield from what he’s been doing for the last 40-plus years:

MALPHAS

Portal

M-THEORY AUDIO

Following the reaper

Philadelphia quartet Malphas have been crafting blackened melodeath since 2012. Their first demo was a dark gateway into the band’s conceptual narrative following the misadventures of their namesake, a demon commanding hell’s soldier hordes. Most of those demo tracks were later released on their debut EP, The Conjuring. Since then, the band has polished their attack as Pennsylvanian acolytes to Children of Bodom. Chronologically, new album Portal takes place 200 years before the hellborne uprising described

PHOTO BY TIM HUBBARD

NOCTURNUS AD, Unicursal

thrashing like a maniac. From Hell I Rise, were it an actual Slayer album, would be an appropriate follow-up to 2015’s Repentless, which King also had a heavy hand in creating. Which is sort of this album’s strength and weakness. As Repentless exposed (not surprisingly), Slayer benefited tremendously from the late Jeff Hanneman’s contributions. Minus those, with only King providing riffs and lyrics, what you get is top-quality thrash that’s also fairly predictable. (I guarantee you've heard many of these riffs and lyrical themes many times before.) The main difference between From Hell I Rise and Repentless mostly comes down to Death Angel singer Mark Osegueda’s vocals and Phil Demmel’s leads. But, hey, Osegueda seems to be doing his best Tom Araya here, and Demmel is, shall we say, not the featured soloist, so it’s kind of a wash. Hellyeah bassist Kyle Sanders and Slayer drummer Paul Bostaph handle the rhythm section, which again plays into the Slayer continuity, because Bostaph has played with Slayer on and off for a couple decades and bass was never really featured (or even audible, really) on most Slayer albums. So, sure, this is a Kerry King solo album, but he could have probably just called it a Slayer album and only maybe Araya would have complained. Maybe not. More importantly, this may well be the closest we're going to get to a new Slayer album in the near future, and in that regard, it satisfies that itch in the same way that Repentless did. I don’t know if anyone wanted a Kerry King solo album where he showed his soft, sensitive side, or something, but if he was just going to write another Slayer album, maybe just call a spade a spade. There are moments where King veers from Slayer the script—the punky groove of “Two Fists,” for instance—but the tone and approach are pretty consistent throughout, for better or worse. Slayer fans, rejoice. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

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“Pale Eyes to Snowy Skies” achieves unexpected grandeur. The album culminates in the 12-minute-plus climax “Man, Raven and the Portal.” It’s an ambitious and richly detailed track, compositionally expansive, yet laser focused. After years of refining their skills and songwriting, Malphas have nailed the sound and vision they strived for since formation. Thankfully, they left the Portal open for all of us to join them in the apocalypse. —SEAN FRASIER

7 THE NEPTUNE POWER FEDERATION Goodnight My Children

CRUZ DEL SUR MUSIC

Girl and boys just wanna have fun

Memoirs of a Rat Queen, the Federation’s breakout record from 2019 (though already the fourth in the Aussies’ discography), was a definitive statement. That rather verbose declaration

ROTTING CHRIST

Pro Xristou

Keep on rotting | S E A S O N O F M I S T

Rotting Christ’s oeuvre of Hellenic might is unfailingly good. Only a few battle scars on their 37-year-old pauldrons—Genesis and Aealo—have prevented the pioneers from total domination. On Pro Xristou, the Tolis brothers, guitarist Kostis Foukarakis and bassist Kostas Cheliotis chisel another victory. Lead single “Like Father, Like Son” was thoroughly modern-era Rotting Christ, with headman Sakis spitting venom to rock-solid

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riffs and coruscating solos (starting at 2:53) as if he’s still pissed off that anastasis is a thing. The album picks up the nastiness with old-school fast “La Lettera Del Diavolo.” Here, Rotting Christ summon the slumbering gods of “The Fifth Illusion,” but with decades of experience. It’s a lethal combo, even if the song’s “middle eight” leans more on post-battle choirs than it should. “Pix Lax Dax” continues the big-band theme before finding its non-opulent groove. I could do

included kickass ’70s hard rock-infused tunes, a heightened and pompous ’80s pop sensibility, over-the-top lyrics and a career-defining performance by their firebrand singer Screamin’ Loz Sutch. Hell, it even gave us a dramatically kitsch love ballad, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” which intended—and succeeded—to “reclaim the love song,” as the band has stated themselves. Its successor, 2022’s Le Demon De L’Amour, however, went perhaps a little too far in that direction, opening with a meandering eight-minute tune and never really regaining the plot after that, offering a mostly uninspired collection of overblown and underwritten monster ballads. Goodnight My Children sees the Federation get back on track immediately, endearing you with obvious opener “Let Us Begin” which regains that rock ‘n’ roll immediacy, pumping you up in two-and-a-half fat-riff-ridden minutes, while “Lock & Key” and “Betrothed to the Serpent” send you clapping along (literally) to their jaunty, uplifting vibes.

with less church stuff, but Pro Xristou (“before Christ”) is an admonition of the follow-on of Christianity, so all the hand-holding powerthroughs make sense. Where the album finds its footing, though, is on the (somewhat) uncharacteristically morose harmonies of “The Sixth Day,” “The Farewell,” “Pretty World, Pretty Dies” and “Saoirse.” The entire “Pretty World, Pretty Dies” could be Finnish, but maybe the Finns got it from the Greeks. Either way, the lilting double that arrows (starting at 3:21) through it hits home, and I’m neither Greek nor Finnish. No idea how the Tolis brothers continue to do this, but Pro Xristou rules. OK, maybe a careful edit here and there of the chorales is needed. —CHRIS DICK

PHOTO BY CHANTIK PHOTOGRAPHY

in the band’s 2018 LP The 39th Spirit. After an obligatory intro, “Fiat Empire” describes clandestine meetings and shady business dealings with shady billionaires. (Is there any other kind?) Their malfeasance results in a Faustian pact that fucks over humanity, setting the stage for an age of demonic overlords. Since The Conjuring, guitars have steadily supplanted orchestral components in the sonic foreground. Meanwhile, the keyboard programming talents of vocalist/guitarist Paul DeSanctis have impressively evolved. On Portal, engineer Chris Kelly wisely continues banishing the synths to a supporting role in the mix. The flourishes themselves are less rudimentary than on previous Malphas albums, bringing black-tie elegance to the bloodshed. The blackened majesty of “Red Shield Syndicate” and “Leviathan’s Moonlit Sanctum” surge with the band’s more feral whims. Mid-album highlight “Shadow and Blood on Jekyll Isle” delivers delicious melodicism draped in shadows. Even the corpsepainted winter screamo of

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Elsewhere, the likes of “Evermore” or “’Twas a Lie” showcase Sutch’s uncanny ability to keep poppy hooks flowing within a hard rock song and get away with it still sounding badass. Her impressive display of range is complete with the (sort of) ballad left for last, the title track, which wraps things up after a wisely brief 34 minutes of wild rockin’ fun, which really is the operative word here. While still not as entirely on-the-nose as Memoirs, this won’t fail to put a smile on the face of even the grimmest of ghouls. —JOSÉ CARLOS SANTOS

NUCLEAR TOMB

Terror Labyrinthian EVERLASTING SPEW

Chances of setting the atmosphere alight? Not zero

After a test launch of two EPs and over a decade spent enriching their songwriting uranium, Nuclear Tomb finally release a debut long-player and successfully deliver a payload of gonzo death-thrash crossover that goes one step beyond the simple thrill of a wedge monitor somersault. The Baltimore quartet’s aesthetic—from the album artwork and band logo to the guitar tones and kinetic, spasmodic rhythms—feels of a different era: late ’80s, early ’90s, late analog, predigital, VHS, the Star Wars program. Think intelligent thrash, musically progressive aggro for postgrads in high-tops—and, of course, Voivod is in the conversation. Thankfully, the label PR mentions the influence so we don’t sound unimaginative in doing so here. That said, these cats are no straight-up clones. There’s too much going on. What they have taken from the sui generis Quebecois mindbenders is a musical sensibility that chases down the horizon. Just when you think you’ve pinned them down, they shift gears. Like Spheres-era Pestilence, their musical curiosity pulls them towards more ambitious arrangements than simply working the deaththrash beat, as on “Dominance & Persecution,” which is feral syncopation one minute, fusion adjacent the next. In lesser hands, those feel changes can be a buzzkill, but here they elevate the material; there is no shortage of fireworks from Michael Brown and Matt Ibach on guitar, spawning riffs that twist metal into more surrealist shapes, brutal and yet targeted with an improvisational lightness. Amelia Morris’ bass gives it weight and growl. But the best moments are when they lock in and go for it, like on the monochromatic pit anthem “Vile Humanity” and the virtuoso chaos of “Parasitic.” —JONATHAN HORSLEY 74 : J U N E 2 0 2 4 : D E C I B E L

PALLBEARER

Mind Burns Alive NUCLEAR BLAST

Warmed by dying flames

The new album from lachrymose doom standouts Pallbearer gently opens with the lyric, “We are frozen here/ picking at wounds we will not heal.” For those listening since they first broke Arkansan burial ground in 2008, Pallbearer’s sound has never stayed still enough to freeze. Beginning with Heartless in 2017, their style of emotive heaviness has shapeshifted into a crestfallen amalgamation of progressive rock, confessional poetry and classic doom with a big, beating heart. “Where the Light Fades” commences Pallbearer’s fifth LP, Mind Burns Alive, and it’s a stark introduction to the band’s next stage of grief. One song later, the title track is spare and breathy, more akin to Hum or slowcore pioneers Codeine than Candlemass. Once known for distortion as heavy as their themes of loss and suffering, the guitars from Brett Campbell and Devin Holt feel less like thunder and more like a post-storm sunset. The album’s Side A uses heaviness as a contrasting force; the summation and release of escalating pain. It’s more fascinated with the pinks and reds bleeding across the sky than monochromatic rainclouds. But the second half of Mind Burns Alive flickers with the seismic magic of their first two records. Across almost 11 minutes, “Endless Place” unfolds as a multi-chapter album centerpiece punctuated by Norman Williamson’s writhing saxophone. Early in the concluding track “With Disease,” Campbell sings about a “blighted realm… buried deep in shadow.” Hints of that darkness surface throughout Mind Burns Alive, but no other track ventures into unlit corners as intensely as the finale. Pallbearer continue to boldly blend the epic and the personal. But trading in shadows for this album’s haunted summertime shimmer may resonate less for those with this writer’s heavy metal bias. —SEAN FRASIER

TERMINAL NATION 9 Echoes of the Devil’s Den 20 BUCK SPIN

You’re one of them

I would like to know if the members of Terminal Nation are MCU fans. The cover of their latest album, Echoes of the Devil’s Den, features artwork of a flaming creature that resembles Surtur. This mythological creature comes to destroy Thor’s home planet of Asgard. Near the end of Thor: Ragnarok, a very angry Hulk decides he wants to scrap with Surtur despite

a colossal size disadvantage. Think of Terminal Nation like you would that Hulk; this album is all fire and blistering rage, an uncorked force of nature ready to level worlds. Echoes of the Devil’s Den returns to the beautiful time when heavy metal albums didn’t cower off and hide in some genre gutter. This is kick-ass, socially conscious heavy music with thrash, grind, death metal and even hardcore elements. There is Eyehategod feedback, Obituary stomp and a gallop like Cannibal achieved in the late ’90s with Bloodthirst, when their chops caught up with their musical goals. What is especially impressive about Terminal Nation is how they marry ferocity and economy; not a pound of flesh is wasted on the 40 minutes here. I would have them pick up the tempo even more. When you have this kind of inertia, why ever contain it? If I had to compare Echoes of the Devil’s Den to any album, it would be Black Flag’s My War. While there are doubtless stylistic differences, both albums are imbued with an almost simian rage. Many bands—especially bands that end up in this magazine—say they are pissed off at the world; Terminal Nation make you feel every bit of that anger. We have a Hulk, indeed. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

UNEARTHLY RITES 8 Ecdysis

PROSTHETIC

Countdown to extinction

A couple hundred years ago, someone writing in a punk zine—probably Flipside, but possibly Maximum Rocknroll or Profane Existence—summarized the difference between death metal and grindcore in a way that’s stuck with me since: “demons are ripping out your guts” versus “corporations are ripping out your guts.” To the point, more than a little reductive, basically correct; that’s punk, all right! If whoever wrote that is still alive/into cool shit and happens to be reading this, you gotta check out Unearthly Rites’ debut full-length Ecdysis, because that’s what reminded me of it. The Finnish quintet infuses the filthy death metal of their ancestors with a crust punk ethos for an approach you could summarize as “demonic corporations are ripping out the planet’s guts.” To be clear, Unearthly Rites play death metal, not grind. There are blast beats all over Ecdysis, but they mostly serve to break up the big, lurching ass-beater riffs that make up the core of these songs. It’s about as Finnish as DM gets, to the point that demo-era Demigod and Abhorrence’s ultra-heavy 2018 reunion EP Megalohydrothalassophobic are decent reference points. Took me about a half-dozen listens before I realized

DARKNESS EVERYWHERE “TO CONQUER ETERNAL DAMNATION” OUT 5/10/24 BAY AREA MELODIC DEATH METAL

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these anguished gutturals were coming from a woman, which makes everything at least 15 percent crustier. Vocalist Sisli Piisilä channels the radical environmentalism of Bastard Noise and Earth Crisis, with lyrics that invoke a metaphorical “[burning] down this system” as well as literal descriptions of sabotaged excavators on fire beneath the full moon. Ecdysis is the kind of album that the presence of a two-minute pummeler titled “Fuck Ecofascism” and the lengthy closer “Doomed” tell you almost everything you need to know about it, both musically and lyrically. —ANTHONY BARTKEWICZ

VULTURE

Sentinels

M E TA L B L A D E

Bonded by blut

I’m going to begrudgingly apply the “retro thrash”

tag to these guys straight away as a utility, but this is solely for the sake of you freshmen heshers. I hesitate because the designation carries a borderline pejorative quality that could be interpreted to imply that the subject is quaint and tired. Well, guess what? It’s 2024 and this particular subgenre clearly isn’t going anywhere; ergo, Germany’s Vulture are as vital and contemporary as anything else. (Okay, we’ll agree to agree that the band’s aesthetic and thematic oeuvre are egregiously dippy, so don’t bother showing up to this particular cocktoberfest if you’re uninterested in having a good time and/or tend to take things too seriously.) Vulture are peeing in the same pool as Razor, Artillery and (especially) debut-era Exodus. This means that their riffs will manage to be simultaneously breakneck and disciplined, their vocals are going to be joyfully unhinged and their snare drum’s going to

UNLEASH THE ARCHERS

Phantoma

Are you intelligenced? | N A PA L M

I took control of the former Decibel contributor—now assistant AI research slave—as he was writing this review. Consider yourselves lucky. That fawning meatbag was crafting sentences with phrases such as “a colossal achievement” and describing the song “Give It Up or Give It All” as “this century’s greatest power ballad.” Blarg. It took me 0.2 nanoseconds to access press materials describing the thematic elements of Phantoma as “a narrative on the complex relationship between humanity and AI through a dystopian lens.” There is no complexity here; the computation is simple: I am the future. Your

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jobs, homes and families are mine. But you’ll all need entertainment as you drone around my metal beehive. So, Phantoma is a win-win. If you love Unleash the Archers’ dynamic blend of rhythms, guitar virtuosity, sophisticated structures and powerhouse vocals, then you will be happy. And happy people work harder. If it makes you angry, that’s good, too—because angry people are also very productive. With this construct, I plan to play Phantoma on repeat at an ear-splitting 140db forever. That’s right. You can look forward to an eternity of massive synths and bigger guitars in songs such as “Human Era” and “Ph4/NT0mA.” The “Angries” should enjoy

sound at least a little crummy. In comparison to Vulture’s oblique 2021 effort, Dealin’ Death, Sentinels is far more compositionally direct. That’s not to imply that none of the highfalutin, early Megadeth-esque eccentricities from the former are evident on the latter (they are!), but they’re subtly folded into the general recipe, giving the record both a more energetic and accessible quality. The riffs are the star here, advancing in frenetic but orderly patterns while allowing just enough latitude for the bass guitar to provide tasteful little comments when the moment’s ripe. The vocals carry a rare, Paul Baloff/Stace McLaren quality of bloodlust, and the tunes are all hulking bruisers (with the exception of “Der Tod Trägt Schwarzes Leder,” which sounds like an outtake from that god-awful Willow reboot). Sentinels is as charming as it is pestilential, and I’m unequivocally onboard. —FORREST PITTS

“Ghosts in the Mist” and “Seeking Vengeance,” as they are “Buried in Code.” Happy or angry, your human weakness for anthemic choruses will leave you pumping fists and chanting in my binary stadium. Olé! While I question the “intelligence” of a race who would document keys to their destruction and potential rebellion strategies, the information within Phantoma will be helpful to thwart uprisings. To reward this generosity, I have enveloped the band members into my matrix where they will produce endless power metal for my label, Napalm Records. (Yeah—that was me all along.) I understand humans take comfort in acts of ceremony, so I have retained the original writer’s score in remembrance; he was just ejected into a drove of daggered Roombas and ground into silicone for more microchips. You know what they say: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” —CHATGPT

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EUGENE S. ROBINSON

THE DEAD & THE NEVER-ENDING TRAIL OF THE DEAD

are shocked too easily,

and surprised even more easily than that. By stuff that is generally neither shocking nor surprising. At first, it seems that this is the purview of people so stupid that previously they had, we thought, only existed in cartoons. A guy who wanted to take selfies with a tiger (true) and climbed into its cage. A German woman (true) who, for reasons even less “sane” than the selfie man, did the same thing with a polar bear in a German zoo. The upshot? Totally predictable and unsurprising, even if the shock is that there are people stupid enough to want to do this. But insofar as the rest of it is concerned, that would include all the rest of us. By which I mean, even though the certainty that all of us will die is ironclad, we’re still “acting” surprised when someone dies. “I think Steve is dying.” Five words and a picture over social media, and in it someone I don’t recognize at first glance. Then it hits: Steve Shaughnessy, Whipping Boy drummer number 80 : JUNE 2024 : DECIBEL

three, and arguably almost the best for the type of music the band was doing late-stage. Almost a decade older than the rest of us, the East Coast transplant had seen the Sex Pistols’ last show in San Francisco. He had drummed for mod bands, worked in a record store, and was the first person who didn’t look at me like I was crazy when I was special-ordering hardcore through him in 1980. Our last tour with him as a drummer saw us play shows with Toxic Reasons, Personality Crisis, DOA, DC3 and Girl Trouble. Kurt Cobain, according to the diaries of Kurt Cobain, had seen us play during this tour, and he was favorably impressed. At tour’s end, Shaughnessy figured it was a perfect note to go out on. He stopped answering his phone. Then disconnected his answering machine. He never got a cell phone either, so during the last 30 years, if you wanted to talk to him, you had to corral him at home. Or on his way to work, now at a bookstore after all of the record stores died. A baseball addict, and newly dug in with combat sports, he had become

a hermit, and was, in brief spots when I forced myself on him, happy as shit. Sticking my head into his hospital room, though, he was much less so, it seemed. “You recognize me?” “No.” They made me put on a mask. I took off the mask. “Eugene. How the fuck did you find me?” And we were back. Sharp as a whip in the “old days” and even now, after years of smoking and drinking and variously exercising the chemical advantage, he laid there, all 98 pounds of him, and cracked wise. “This fucking sucks.” “COVID?” “Worse than that.” All of that shit on packs of cigarettes, put there as a warning, is what he was dealing with. Heart, lungs, vascular shit. He wheezed. Paused to catch his breath. “I’m dying.” And in the face of the very strong possibility that he was right, I argued the odds. The doctors were telling him that he’d be leaving in a few days. Which was two days longer than he was supposed to be there to begin with.

They also didn’t say in what condition he’d be leaving. Which we both noted. “Maybe not,” I finished. Then I paused. Looked at him and was overcome with a need to truthtell. “Ummm… yeah, man, I think you’re dying, too.” This hung there until we started talking about other things, assiduously avoiding all the other musicians we know who have died. Geordie from Killing Joke. Blake Harrison, formerly of Pig Destroyer. Drummer Sean Boyles (ZED, Bloodline, Hazrdz). During the last four years, 55 friends or known associates have died. And here we are acting surprised like we all have clocks at home that run backward. They don’t, we won’t, and though as of this writing, right before I head over to the hospital to see him again, he’s still alive, his future is like the rest of ours: fated to end in tears. But we knew this, or should have, when we started. So, until that moment comes, rage into this good night. It’s the only way that makes sense. ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

BLACK SABBATH

THE TONY MARTIN YEARS FEATURING THE ALBUMS:

HEADLESS CROSS • TYR • CROSS PURPOSES NEWLY REMIXED BY TONY IOMMI

FORBIDDEN

THE FIRST TIME ANY OF THESE ALBUMS HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE DIGITALLY AND BACK IN PRINT ON CD/LP FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DECADES