Carnage Pit (FIN) - Ritual (2010)

Country: Finland
Released on: self-released

Tracklist:

1. Dogmatic Bestiality 04:26
2. Swarm of Maggots 03:30
3. Ritual 05:03
4. Dead Legions of Zaphon 02:32
5. Gore-Soaked Whore 05:41
6. Scorned by Messiah 07:59

29:11

My constant struggle to dig out good material in the underground has finally been rewarded again. I just stumbled upon the Ritual EP by a Finnish outfit called Carnage Pit.
First, take a look at the lenght of this release. That's right almost 30 minutes for an EP and every minute is worth it (and no samples, that go on your nerves). Too much bands throw out a 20 minute shit release and call it a full-lenght. Fuck that.
The song-writing is interesting, dynamic and sounds more mature than most of the debut releases of other bands. Intense, technical, grindy and brutal material. I think it’s a drum machine at work there, but the overall impression doesn’t suffer from this. The vocals are a bastard between Defloration (Ger) and maybe Vomitory (Swe), but definitely more on the Death Metal side. I hear so many great parts in the song structures, brilliantly executed technical parts, high speed blasting parts, grindy parts, Nile like parts at some instances (absolutely love that, check out Ritual and Scorned by Messiah and listen closely). Great mixture.The guitar work is excellent and very technical. I love it. The solo work is amazing and absolutely entertaining. The thick and deep as fuck bass sounds through a lot (in the middle of Ritual it’s just amazingly done), which I absolutely like. I like how these guys mix a lot of good elements in Death Metal and Grindcore together, it just sounds vital and authentic. These guys put a lot of thought and passion into this EP and it shows. Very well done guys!

Aggressive, fast, grindy, technical, harmonic, brutal. This great release catched me off guard.

90%

Precognitive Holocaust Annotations (int.) - Annunciation of Extermination (2013)

Country: Italy
Released on: Permeated Records

Tracklist:

1. Waking Hallucination 02:38
2. Cellular Preconnection 02:15
3. Calculating Magnitudo 02:46
07:39

Next Italian release is one with my bro Hannes (Indecent Excision) from Italy. Their new promo Annunciation of Extermination has been eagerly awaited by a lot of people.
The three songs on this promo are heavily produced BDM with brilliant recording quality. The bass is perfectly audible and the wobbling sound of it together with the slam ridden riffing is excellent. The drum sound is saturated and differentiated. The snare is relatively soft and not too harsh and fits perfectly for the overall concept.
The song writing is just brilliant and I am almost certain, that Hannes wrote the music, although I haven’t asked him. The Italian gene of creating balanced, dynamic and excellent song structures in DM/BDM is just too apparent. While the focus of this promo certainly lies on heavy slamming, it doesn’t drift too much in the Russian slam type of music. The heavy slam parts are regularly followed by faster mid tempo groove passages and fast blast parts. Weird and very memorable guitar leads together with the short intro sequences create a Wormed (ESP) or Annihilation (CN) kind of space vibe. I really love that concept. It brings a lot of dynamic elements to the music.
Lühring’s (Defeated Sanity) vocal performance is once again outstanding. He fits perfectly into the concept of this promo and his experience as a vocalist is very well implemented into the bigger picture.

A very entertaining, excellently written, dynamic and well produced promo. Can’t wait to hold this promo and the debut album in my hands.

88%

Logic of Denial (IT) - Atonement (2013)

Country: Italy
Released on: Comatose Music

Tracklist:

1. Reek of Perpetual Infamy 03:15
2. Weeping upon Repugnance 04:00
3. Behold the Throne of Torture 03:11
4. Vile Blessing Prelude 03:20
5. The Ravenous Patterns (of Oblivion) 02:52
6. Sepsis 03:56
7. Catharsis Through Ungodly Annihilation 03:40
8. Apocrypha 03:25
9. Oracles of Iniquity 03:27
10. Ecthra 04:27
11. Despondency 04:35
40:08

Let’s start the Italian week with Logic of Denial’s new album called Atonement. I don’t know if the Italians are the master race, or why all of their their BDM/DM bands are so brilliant. And Logic of Denial are no exception.
Their new effort is technical, fast, orthodox and brutal as hell. In the tradition of other Italian Death Metal bands they combine extreme musical brilliance, supreme song-writing, excellent vocal work and a totally harmonic mixture of traditional Death Metal with the more modern Brutal Death Metal approach, intensity and extreme speed, forging everything together what makes BDM/DM great. This for me has always been the reason why I consider Italian bands the absolute elite of today’s global BDM/DM scene.
The album starts with a quick fade in that regorges into a furious and powerful blast orgy right away. This is the way you start an album and this reminded me again on how much intros suck. The sound is gorgeous. The incredible drum work is so tight and sounds just so organic, leaving me with an excited smile. The stamina of this guy must be immense. The riffing is a perfect harmony between technical and extremely well written structures and pounding mid tempo intermezzos, loosened up by an insane solo from time to time. The dynamic and the intensity of this album are just gorgeous and it’s such a pleasure to listen to this piece of art. Some playful moments remind me a bit of a brutalized version of the late Behemoth, but they are suddenly cut off by another blast attack. What’s happening on this record is just grand. The vocals are just so massive, so intense, absolutely furious and dripping with wrath. The sheer speed of the music is a festival of extremity, pushing Death Metal to the limits again, where it belongs.


This record makes me smile. I love how new and old styles join together, how intense it is, how brutal and fast it is, how extremely good the song writing is. This is Italian BDM/DM in its purest and best form. A huge step for Logic of Denial.

95%

Concerning BDM: Less fashion, more passion

I want to start with a little anecdote. I was on a festival some years ago and wore some skate shoes, basketball shorts, a flex fit cap and an Endstille shirt (a German Black Metal band). I have always worn pretty ‘normal’ clothing, some kind of skateboarding style if anything. As I walked across the camping site, some ultra-true Metal fan (the long haired fat dude in a leather jacket kind of fan) shouted “Hey, you fucking Hip Hop fag!” It’s not that this hurt my feelings or anything, but I think this shows very well the typical attitude of most Metal fans.
Now, when I first entered the Death Metal scene and especially the Brutal Death Metal scene I thought that it was a very mature and relaxed scene. The discrepancy between the mostly very extreme imagery and lyrical content and the attitude of the people on the other hand is remarkable. Compared to other Metal scenes, such as the Heavy, Pagan or Black Metal scene etc., BDM people are mostly pretty ‘normal’ and don’t take everything that seriously (except the music itself of course). There aren’t a lot of posers, wannabes or people alike in the scene. People don’t really care too much about what you wear or other superficial things. Or do they?
Although people in this scene are in fact mostly pretty easygoing dudes, there are regularly things people say, that extremely annoy me. One time some people bitch about Pathology being on Victory Records (a hardcore label) and the label magically turns music into ‘core’ (whatever that is). Or when Acranius members wear contemporary clothing they become gay. The other day it’s Devourment not releasing another MTD and offering baseball caps as merchandise (and by that becoming ‘deathcorish’, needless to say). Or bands becoming extremely overrated, because they have a girl on the mic, or people hate other styles of music (Deathcore, Justin Bieber etc.) and put a huge effort into being extremely childish and irrational. This is a bad and petty attitude.
I always thought that the BDM scene was full of grown up and mature people, but that is at least not true for all. Still people are way too superficial, care a lot about the ‘trveness’ of the image and the fashion around the music and act as if they were the most elite BDM fans. But mostly they are just immature and silly. Of course there are a lot of traditions in the culture of Death Metal and most are important for the authenticity of the music and everything around it, but things like clothing are not amongst them.
What people should care about most is the quality of the music and the love for a great genre. Less fashion, more passion.

Cognizance (UK) - Inquisition (2013)

Country: United Kingdom
Released on: self-released

Tracklist:

1. Clones of the Night Sky 03:28
2. The Perennial Struggle 03:40
3. Epistemology 03:19
4. Defying a Natural Process 03:12
13:39

A study by the European commission recently showed, that file sharing was not only not harming the music industry, but was good for sales. Me finding this underground gem of a band, called Cognizance on a big Death Metal sharing forum shows this once again. Although the CD of this EP is already sold out I am able to listen to this and to inform you about it and recommend this. Anyway.
Just take a look at ths awesome cover. Epic piece of art for an epic release. Brilliant.
This CD is just a brilliant piece of work. It shows how rich and entertaining a technical approach in Death Metal can be. Dynamic song structures, interesting riffing, melodic soli, high paced brutality and musical brilliance are the core ingredients for this piece of work. The song writing is brillant and a real pleasure to listen to. The mixture of creative riff work and solo parts thrown in regularly just works brilliantly. The highly melodic and extremely pleasing solo parts take away nothing of the intensity and brutality of the songs. The vocals are straight forward forced Death Metal growls. Brutal, massive and executed perfectly. The drum work is tight as fuck, fast and accompanies the flying riffs perfectly. The production of this EP is absolutely stunning for a debut release. A rich sound, worthy of a full-lenght. Both the production and the music prove the passion that was put into this self-released CD by these two guys from the UK. This band would be a candidate for the Unique Leader roster. Let's just hope they don't go to that shitty label.

Highly entertaining Death Metal release. Brutal, emotional, fast, technical.

88%

Defeated Sanity (GER) - Passages Into Deformity (2013)

Country: Germany
Released on: Willowtip Records

Tracklist:

1. Initiation 01:15
2. Naraka 05:07
3. Verblendung 04:45
4. Lusting for Transcendence 03:06
5. The Purging 04:59
6. Verses of Deformity 04:17
7. Perspectives 06:49
8. Frenzy 02:36
9. Martyrium 04:50
37:44

I was absolutely stoked to be able to listen to the follow up to what for me is one of the best Brutal Death albums ever written: Chapters of Repugnance. I am not a person who cares to wait till my own CD arrives; I’ll pre-listen to shared digitals anyway. It was clear to me that living up to my extremely high expectations wouldn’t be easy for Defeated Sanity.

To be absolutely frank, this album is just grand. It’s January and I am almost certain that there will be no other release this year that can top Passages Into Deformity for me. Lühring’s vocals fit perfectly into the sound of Defeated Sanity; he has adapted a style quite different to the one he used to have on Despondency. It’s not ultra guttural which has also been what I adored on Chapters of Repugnance with Magana It’s his deep forced Death Metal vocals with a lot of variety. Great performance, we need more of that in BDM, not more gurgle, blubber vocals. The instruments are performed on a level of skill and musical brilliance that just offers unequaled opportunities. The riffs dark, crushing, playful, jazzy, slammy, massive and just dripping with brutality and creativity. The bass lines are chunky, perfectly audible which is brilliant and just awesome in their complexity. Gruber plays the drums with a natural esprit to it and with a brilliant sound that is raw and absolutely brutal and perfect in recording quality at the same time. Just beautiful. The music as a whole is just so dynamic, brutal and creative, alternating paces, fast, slow, old school slamming at times, adding an intensity and heaviness to the music that is just great. The song writing is just a celebration of everything that makes BDM great. That’s all I can say.
Now to some very important aspect about Defeated Sanity that is almost unique in the world of BDM for me. A pity actually.
Defeated Sanity is more than just music, it is more than just Death Metal. It is art. It is the depth of the music together with the artwork of the album and the lyrics. The brilliance in it, the thick atmosphere of absolute isolation and darkness you can almost touch, the impression of utter suffering, both fascinating and absolute. It is the elegance of a scalpel instead of the rawness of a bat. It is not the rude brutality that other bands achieve. It is pure violence.

I don’t know what more I can say. Did Passages Into Deformity live up to my expectations? Yes, surprisingly it did, although it seemed almost impossible. Did it top Chapters of Repugnance? I can’t say. They are different, but both perfect in their way. If I had to choose, Chapters of Repugnance would be one percent ahead of Passages Into Deformity. Defeated Sanity are back. They are still the uncrowned kings of the whole genre of BDM. Letting even other brilliant bands far behind, letting all the unimaginative and childlike slam only BDM bands far far behind, Defeated Sanity once again reach yet another peak in the musical landscape.

100%