It's another Monday. A simple, terrible, miracle. A Monday. Time to get motivated for another week of grueling, meaningless effort as a shambling human shell. Such drudgery isn't without its benefits, although I'm failing to recall any at the moment. Hmmmm.... Here is an idea. While I work on the quandy of our existence, why don't you check out some brutal metal albums to calm your nerves? No sense in us doubling our efforts. Especially, if all we're going to do is come up empty-handed.
Dryad - The Abyssal Plain (Prosthetic Records)The depths of the sea called out to humankind. Pulling us back to its sunless cradle. A familial siren cascades up from the churning chasm of the devouring mother's subaquatic womb. Her culling cry is even heard inland, and some howl back in a zealous, rapturous hiss. Iowa's Dryad makes themselves willing vessels for this ancient madness on their visceral and Poseidonion debut LP, The Abyssal Plain. Beckoning forth a baying tempest of black metal, and armored by a scabbard exoskeleton of crust punk, they delve into a sinking sense of airless dread, caressed by a current of acrid incursions and sinister presages curried by a shrowd finely woven dungeon synths. Dryad wastes no time bailing out their harvest, heaving stygian phantasms onto the wharf of your mind, where these eldritch things sprawl and writhe and wind their tendrils into the quivering clefts of your senses. The catch is good, and now the shore is littered with horrors beyond comprehension.
Columbia's Hellion are endowed with a dark, primitive aura, a vicious primal hunger that rumbles from the very soil of the jungle, blind from anger and driven by an insatiable appetite. Their third full-length, The Magic Within, lunges forth, teeth bared, like the skeleton of a decayed jaguar, whose trapped soul suddenly reacquires its former urge to kill, and swiftly makes a go at your neck. The dark forest rebel band makes their deadly presence known by peppering your carcass with toothy waves of repeating thrash grooves, summoned by the sacrificial throaty trill of a black metal spell pilfered from Impurity, an impromptu and roughshod weapon that shoots up from a cold pool of mud, blood, and liquified carrion; biting and rending your flesh like an ax shaving through the bark of a tree. Theirs is a magic that comes from a dark place indeed.
Bones - Vomit (Disorder-Recordings)
Brusingly kinetic death metal from the acres-wide meat locker known as Chicago. This gruff and uncompromisingly muscular group disgorges all their angst over the course of nine, stomach emptying tracks on their fourth LP,
Vomit. The grooves on this god-forsaking brawler will catch you in the paunch with a boot and then sink its knee into your nose as soon as you're doubled over. And you'll probably ask these bad dudes for another as soon as you swish the blood out of your gums and reset your septum. Bones delivers the kind of punishment that is as addictive as a cold flash of vengeance; and just as satisfying too.
Witch Vomit - A Scream From The Tomb Below (Memento Mori)
We end with another dark ritual. Another cthonic murmuration, this time rising like a death rattle from the side of a mountain, a stone barrier between our world and sphere of exile used to contain a crooked serpentess and scion of sin. Its mighty, scaled coils shaking the very fabric of reality with its inpatient thrash, causing the air to fill with a sickening rumble that shudders the humors until they dispel into disarray. Witch Vomit's
A Scream From The Tomb Below will assemble all the beldams and hex-weavers of the banished and forgotten places to a single rancid pyre, a stewing pit where they may prepare the offerings of their final orgastic, wicked sabbath; presided over by a baneful guttural gurgle that tears open the sky in a torrent of acid rain and underwritten by a ripple of explosive grooves that could strip a cliff face of its graduate and leave nothing but a disfigured monument to bedlam in its place. Witch Vomit's searing death metal smirch harbors a painful echo that will spread through time until the cycle of rejuvenation and apocalyptic resolution can begin again under the cataract gaze of heartless stars.
