Obituary and the Xecutioner's Return

They’ve only released slightly more than half-a-dozen albums during the past two decades, but in the case of death metal legends Obituary, quality definitely trumps quantity. The band’s early catalog – albums like Slowly We Rot (1989) and Cause Of Death (1990) – virtually defined the entire death metal genre, from the band’s radical use of down-tuned guitars and Sabbath-strength riffs to their lightning-fast thrashy fretwork and instrumental time changes. Obituary helped put the state of Florida on the death metal map while inspiring a legion of followers like Malevolent Creation, Morbid Angel and others that exploded in their wake. By the mid-90s, however, the death metal crown had been wrested from any US/UK contenders by a bunch of snot-nosed Scandinavian kids weaned on Obituary and Death albums.

After nearly a decade of inactivity, Obituary came roaring back in 2005 with the powerful Frozen In Time. The band sounded exactly as if it had, indeed, been “frozen in time,” Rip Van fuckin’ Winkle returning from a deep drugged sleep, the album an incredible throwback to the glory days of late-80s/early-90s death metal. Now that most of us have since caught our breath from the knockout punch that was Frozen In Time, the band hits the street hard with Xecutioner’s Return, its second collection of slaughterhouse tunes in a mere two years. Harkening back to the band’s original name – Xecutioner – the reformed Obituary’s latest album kicks out even more of their trademark charnelhouse churn-n-burn for their adoring fans.

No compromise, no surrender may as well be Obituary’s credo, for Xecutioner’s Return offers the listener no place to hide from the sonic onslaught. Damn near every song hits your tender ears like a ragged-edged razor slicing effortlessly through a roadkill carcass. John Tardy’s vocals have been reduced to a feral growl, a mythological man-wolf barking at demons that only he can see, while guitarists Trevor Peres and Ralph Santolla (from Iced Earth and Millenium) wield their axes like weapons: electroshocking you with rapidfire, crystalline fretboard runs one minute, bludgeoning you with massive doomy riffage the next. The rhythm department of bassist Frank Watkins and drummer Donald Tardy pound your frontal lobe relentlessly, like the business end of a big truck’s cold steel fender, and then they back up and run over your sorry ass again!

Metal mavens searching for the “next big thing” won’t find it here, nor will you find advances on the form as provided by bands like Meshuggah, Nile or Mastodon. What you will find is an old-school death metal romp as only the guys that go by the name of Obituary could deliver. Seldom have four otherwise gentile chaps made music this elemental, this malevolent, this frightening…. (Candlelight Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Xecutioner's Return from Amazon.com)

The Kings of Death-N-Roll Return!

I swear, I put this thing on the box and sparks started flyin' like ball lightning. The low bass kicked in, bouncing off my head like a concrete police baton and then the guitars - those damn guitars - started to shred my eardrums like a hungry carnivore tearing into a hot meal. Yeah, verily, I speak of the mighty Entombed, Swedish purveyors of black noise most disturbing and yet alluring. Serpent Saints is the hallowed band’s new album, a return to the magnificent metal onslaught of 2003’s Inferno and a gut-busting, liver-shaking, migraine-injecting exercise in tension in its own right.

Serpent Saints kicks off with the title track, a deceptive bit of hallucinogenic, hypnotic six-string noodling leading the listener down a dark path on a rainy night, the drums kicking in like thunderstorms on the horizon…and then L.G. Petrov’s werewolf-like vocals kick in and the guitars assault your ears like a concussion grenade. Serpent Saints and its follow-up, Masters Of Death, both flex the band’s thrash muscles, getting good and limber to better drop to the ground and limbo dance across Thy Kingdom Come and Amok’s low-frequency, bass-heavy doom-like soundscapes.

If the first four of the ten monster tracks on Serpent Saints haven’t caused you to wet your bed and dive beneath the mattress in horror, wait until yer hungry lobes get snatched up by the razor-sharp fishhook of Warfare Plague Famine Death, a tasteful tune straight outta the Four Horsemen’s fakebook, the wiry, tense, demonic six-string pyrotechnics scatting around your cranium like a thousand bloodsucking locusts. Yowsa!

The Dead, The Dying, And The Dying To Be Dead is an impressive cross between Sabbath-inspired riff-laden doom and classic Entombed death-n-roll, with galloping drumbeats, bass to beat you over the head with, disturbing fretwork and lyrics so angry one wonders why Petrov’s head doesn’t burst into flames when he sings ‘em….

Love Song For Satan is just plain ooky-spooky, cult voices heard beneath a fog of ambience when the song goes all scratchy and industrial with backwards vox and arcane refrains and found sounds and metallic crashing and, well, you’ll certainly be headed for hell in a handbasket of your own weaving if you listen to closely to this song, kiddies…and I’ll see you there!

Entombed has often been criticized by notoriously tight-minded death metal fanatics for the band’s frequent experimentation in other less…shall we say…metallic endeavors. The result is always the same, however – the band takes a trip down a stylistic side street of its choosing, expands its musical palette, and returns to metal with its batteries recharged and its instruments set on stun, stomp and blister.

After their intriguing (and enjoyable) dalliance with classical ballet forms on Unreal Estate, Entombed has eagerly jumped headfirst back into the abyss with Serpent Saints, an album every bit as stone-crushingly powerful as anything these talented Swedes have ever recorded. (Candlelight Records USA)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Serpent Saints from Amazon.com)

Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade

It’s metal migraine time down on the farm again and lemme tell ya, kiddies, nobody delivers a skull-crushing good time like Pro-Pain. These NYC hardcore punters have been delivering the goods for nigh onto a decade-and-a-half, give or take a busted eardrum or two, and with Age of Tyranny, the band’s tenth studio album, Pro-Pain puts any rumors of their early retirement to bed with a blistering lyrical attack on “King” George and the entire Bush administration. Needless to say – tho’ I’ll say it anyway – the band backs up its fighting words with music as brutal as the business end of a pair o’ brass knuckles in a dark alley.

Besides being the band’s tenth album and their fifteenth anniversary, Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade is also an honest-to-whatever-deity-you-fear “concept” album. No worries, though, ‘cause the guys aren’t about to go “prog” and trade in their steel-toed boots and stacks-o-amps for Earth™ shoes and synthesizers anytime soon. With this album and these songs, Pro-Pain hope to draw an analogy between President Bush’s misguided “War On Terrorism” and the historical (Christian) Crusades. As singer Gary Meskil explains, “it is believed by many that our leaders are rushing us to Armageddon via a self-fulfilling prophecy which deviously mirrors that of Biblical Prophecy, and that rapture-ready Christianity remains complicit for obvious reasons. These are terrible yet interesting times.”

That’s some lofty premise, and Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade delivers in spades. Patterned after the same sort of high-voltage bile that Pro-Pain cranked out with 2005’s hard-knocks LP Prophets of Doom, songs like “The New Reality,” “Iraqnam” and “Impeach, Indict, Imprison” evince a certain heavy metal radicalism. The band enlists the efforts of Icarus Witch’s Matt Bizilia on the dark-hued “Beyond The Pale,” his arcane, ethereal vox adding an otherworldly sonic vibe to the song’s esoteric bludgeoning.

Taken altogether, these songs engage in dangerous, riot-inciting, downright seditious wordplay that nevertheless deserves to be heard, venomous vocals backed by some of the hardest, most incendiary of hardcore-tinged, thrash-loving, heavy fucking metal this side of the nightmare jams of Northern Europe. Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade may not win many converts, but it might open the eyes of some bright young metal fan ready to do their “patriotic duty” and dissuade them from enlisting in King George’s endless war-machine. With this album, Pro-Pain has come full-stride, earning their reputation as “the thinking man’s heavy metal band” with a brace of intelligent songs guaranteed to tickle your intellect while they bash your brain cells into submission. (Candlelight Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Age Of Tyranny from Amazon.com)

TMQ First Take: MITHRAS

MITHRAS
Behind The Shadows Lie Madness
(Candlelight Records USA)

Beneath the overwhelming ugliness of the basic chrome death-metal cosmetics lies a shimmering, mesmerizing fantasy world of wonder. Yup, put aside for a moment the leonine growls that sound like a wizened, toothy hunter on the prowl; ignore the earache-inducing, suicidal fretboard runs that cut like a scalpel through flesh; pay no attention to the lightning-like drumbeats that hit you in the forehead like an out-of-control Gatling gun. There…beneath all the bombast, the blurry riffing and the imploding rhythms…there’s the sweet spot that only Mithras is capable of creating. The moonlight glinting off the gossamer threads of the spider’s web before he falls upon his prey with a fierce hunger…that’s Behind The Shadows Lie Madness. And like the glimpse of a shadow of something that’s not supposed to be there in the darkness, the credits roll, the CD ends, and you’re left breathless at the sheer insanity of it all.

(Click on CD cover to buy Behind The Shadows Lie Madness from Amazon.com)