It's another Metal Monday! Huzzah! I've once again picked four metal albums from my recent rotation of heavy and Hail Satan-ing albums to say a little something about. I picked these albums based only on the fact that they inspired me to write something about them. Like most things I do with the blog, there is/was/may never be a plan. I'm just feelin' out a vibe here folks. Funnily enough, a theme did emerge. All of the albums I wanted to write about turned out to be one flavor or another of death metal. So that's what we're going with tonight. Welcome to Metal Monday: Four Ways to Die Edition!
Your first death tonight is by drowning. I have been witness to Calgary's Wake in the grips of an escalating, fast-progressing evolution since they caught my eye with 2018's Misery Rites. Since then, they have emerged from a state of hideous, Vermin Womb gestated punk and grind, and through the masticating gauntlet of 2020's Devouring Ruin, where the tenor of their increasing technical proficiency took on the arduous acrimony of black metal, and now through their latest album, Thought Form Descent, they have managed to ascend to a new plateau of transcendence. Their latest LP sees the band embodying a form akin to a liquid golem, one that can evaporate, freeze and flood at will- splashing between the cataract maelstrom of Inter Arma and the plague-bearing death rattle of Hissing, all while burying you in a concrete pour of sound so dense that it will squeeze the oxygen out of you like steam screaming from a tea kettle. This crush of gratuitous hostility is not just impenetrable, but veering on inexplicable as well, as throughlines of psychedelic guitars whip and parry throughout its intestines like electric eels gliding around the interior of a glacier, writhing and taunting as if they were thrashing in shallow water rather than the impassable interior of a wall of stone-solid ice. You will sink so fast into Thought Form Descent that you'll barely have the chance to scream before you disappear below the tension of its troubled, fluid mantel.
Your second death is by way of madness. Cryptae is a Dutch death metal band, comprised of Kees Peerdeman of Heavy Natural and René Aquarius of... so many bands, not the least of which is Dead Neanderthals (my personal favorite of all of his projects). Their second LP, Capsule has the mechanistic and fatalistic character of Portal attempting to write a Cynic tribute album, only to be murdered and replaced by AI-enabled automatons who repurposed the album into a weapon of psychological warfare. The production is raw, and yet you can hear every tendon-sheering guitar chord and the spray of spital from every teeth-baring snarl. The structure of the tracks is a maze of circuitous passages, winding and intersecting beneath its own folds and muscular undulations like a heap of pythons engaging in incestuous coitus. Motherboards melt over fretboards, flesh fuses with fiber optics mesh, and heartbeats come to echo electronic polyrhythms. A merging of machine and human malice in an asylum of absolute dread. Capsule is the prism through which we may view our ultimate destiny and defeat.
Destillat - Under Black Horizons (Self-Released)
Your third death is by poisoning. This ignominious end comes courtesy of German's Destillat, whose debut LP Under Black Horizons is the product of a venomous ferment of melo-death and black metal. Lyrical guitar solos rise into the air like volleys of arrows before a marauding groove sweeps your legs and the gnashing, war-dog snap and minor-dragon breath of fire that is the vocals start ripping at your exposed cadaver, spreading your entrails around like lunchmeat from an upturned lunchpail. It's unsavory and difficult to discount, like the taste of blood slowly spreading throughout your mouth and mixing with your saliva. Tales of war, lust, and greed, distilled into rumbling charges of moral soothsaying of near-operatic proportions- dragging you to a peak of emotions in order to show you how far man's folly can cause him to fall. Under Black Horizons tells a tale older than time, and teaches a lesson older than grave dirt- the deadliest poison in human history has always been his own hubris.
Gridlink - Longhena (Selfmadegod Records)
Your fourth death this evening shall be by vivisection and your surgeon/executioner is Japan's Gridlink. They aren't traditional death metal or grindcore band (by any stretch of the imagination) but they get the job done. Longhena was the band's last album before splitting up. Released in 2014, it was the pinnacle of artfully pristine and precise intentionality, manifest through frenetic guitar playing and impeccably timed, tension-bursting grooves. Grindcore is generally considered the sloppy and willfully homely cousin of both metal and punk, but Gridlink was able to show that it could be something beautiful and refined when taken seriously. Longhena is as much a science as an art, and its cutting precision and conscious musicality still make many modern metal albums look like the petrified skeletons of malformed prehistroic beasts. For these reasons, and so many more, Gridlink will always be king. What an honor it must be to meet them in both of your final, and finest hours.