Sometimes you just need a good, hard, guitar roil to help you grind the mill wheel another day. Death metal is an awesome place to look when you're low on inspiration and in need to jump-start that part of your brain that houses your will to live. And frankly, the burning animus crafted by the likes of LA's Abysmal Dawn does just that for me. Now LA may be better known for its thrash scene, but regional preferences have not stopped the Abysmal Dawn from earning a devoted following for their solid live performances and miraculously consistent recorded output. Phylogenesis is their fifth album and comes six years after the release of 2014's Obsolescence. Both albums continue to play to the group's strengths as they proceed to write original material in the vein of Morbid Angel and Incantation. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, just close your browser now because I'm about to drop a heaping helping of mad love on this hot, filthy devil. The first track "Mundane Existence" will remind you what it's like to live, with a ground cleaving tear of relentless blastbeats, savaging tempo changes, and oversized, tarantula venom spitting guitar licks. "The Path of the Totalitarian" is similarly swift, debauched and relentless, while "Hedonistic" has a malignant majesty to it that leans into Opeth-esque melodic territory, and "Coerced Evolution" dredges up the bassy growl and foul melodicism of '90s groove metal, feeling like a twisted joint enterprise of Cannibal Corpse and Pantera with a tech-grind edge. But if you're really craving the acrid tang of that OSDM flavor, look no further than the closer "Flattening of Emotions," a gritty, bloody, and brutal cover of a Death classic. On Phylogenesis, Abysmal Dawn may be sticking to some familiar patterns, but when behaviors prove adaptive and favor an organism's survival, why do anything differently? Seriously, Abysmal Dawn is helping me get through another god awful day, and they might just do the same for you if you're willing to surrender the reigns to them for the next forty-odd minutes of yours.
