Texas, man, it's a whole different kind of place. While the Midwest is still sheltering itself from the last blizzardly breaths of winter, they're already in the swelter of summer. But this is not a normal summer, you understand... from what I hear it's like the state is closer to the sun than the rest of the country. Like camping on a frying pan with a gas flame dancing beneath its keel. It's the kind of place where you can find free rattlesnake jerky sizzling on the ground in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and you can stick an egg in your back pocket and barbecue it on your own butt sweat. Dust-choked, UV-deathray-sautéed, half-buried in sift and seemingly forsaken by God, it's the sort of place that you have to be half-coyote to survive in. It's the only place on Earth I would believe a band like Creeping Death would call home. Named after a Metallica song off
Ride the Lightning, Creeping Death is basically a death metal crossover band with a lot of metallic hardcore and thrash elements woven through its core, forming a rough subdermal exoskeleton of rusty barbed wire and reclaimed heavy machinery. Boundless Domain is their second LP, following up on their
RuneScape-inspired debut
Wretched Illusions, and their tribute to late Power Trip singer Riley Gale, 2021's
The Edge of Existence EP. Their sound combines elements of '90s death à la Bolt Thrower with Swedish death by way of Entombed, the thrashy peel of Morbid Visions-era Sepultura, the vicious deathcore of Human Error, and the hardcore thunder-horse pummel of twisted Lone Star stallions Iron Age. Their sound and aesthetic are in line with the death metal revival hardcore like Fuming Mouth and Brainoil from a few years back, but with a certain element of savagery that you can only acquire from forging under rocks for bugs and lizards to fortify your sustenance. "Cursed" is a steamroller of galloping beats and meat-rending guitar churns, while the title track vacillates between a dry-rot, thrash-necrotic pit of pestilence and a d-beat death-nado of crust-punk fury. Following closely behind is "Intestinal Wrap," a sufficiently fast and terrifying barbed-whiplash of a number with some bold and brutal thrash elements sounding like Outer Heaven doing a Red Death impression, with the final track "The Common Breed" offering a buffet of gorgeously gruesome old school death worship with enough of a classic punk pulse to keep you headbanging until your dome is filled with nothing but batter-whipped, pink toothpaste.
Boundless Domain is as brutal and inexhaustible as the arid plains from which it hails.
On some label of something.*
*Ok, so Boundless Domain is released on MNRK Heavy. I don't know what MNRK stands for, so I'm just going to assume it's a stand-in for malarky. I'm also not going to link to said label because it's like a brand or something managed by a tangle of conglomerates, and I really don't care. I wrote this review not knowing what label Creeping Death was on, and simply because I like their record. After I finished though, I sort of regret it because you really don't get much more into the realm of faceless corporate halls of mirrors than whatever entity is currently distributing this record.
