The Rochester band’s debut is a vicious and nauseating blast of classic death metal: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed.
Death is their chief lyrical concern and avowed metal subgenre, but the members of Rochester, New York’s Undeath share a decidedly life-affirming outlook. “I think all of us love death metal so much,” vocalist Alexander Jones explained to Invisible Oranges, “because when it’s done well, it sits right at the intersection of pure musicianship and mindless fun.” There is a specific type of fun he is referring to: the spine-tingling thrill of campy horror movies, of screaming unintelligibly for no reason at all, of song titles like “Kicked in the Protruding Guts” and “Chained to a Reeking Rotted Body.” It is the restless, ridiculous heartbeat underlying their music.
After a few well-loved demos, Undeath’s debut album, Lesions of a Different Kind, never leans too far to either side of the death metal pendulum. It is a vicious and nauseating blast: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed. What appeals about a song like “Acidic Twilight Visions” is the immediacy—a pummeling groove, a climactic solo, an honest-to-god chorus. But the closer you listen, the more you hear the virtuosity underlying their chaos, a complex web of interlocking parts that can turn on a dime from jackhammer shredding to guttural dissonance.
This old-school death metal, akin to the early work from fellow breakout revivalists like Tomb Mold and Blood Incantation, involves a purposeful lack of dynamics, indecipherable lyrics, and melodies that seem in danger of dissolving into a murky, low-end drone. The strength of the songs largely comes down to the riffs, which are remarkable throughout. Nearly every track opens with a memorable guitar part from Kyle Beam, and he guides his bandmates through an album that brings to mind plenty of the greats (Autopsy, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and more are saluted in the liner notes) but coheres into a singular force.
This confidence allows Lesions of a Different Kind to stand out in the field of gory death metal worship. It also helps that the band has leveled up on the production, resulting in an album built for repeated listens. On their early demos, part of the excitement was hearing exceptional death metal rising from the fog: their killer interplay buried beneath layers of fuzz and gnarly tones at war with the songcraft. But on Lesions, Undeath give their music a visceral, lived-in clarity. Drummer Matt Browning, who also illustrated the cover art, comes through the speakers sounding particularly vicious: His manic performance in the title track plays like someone tasked with replicating the sound of aerial warfare.
If Undeath sound hyper-focused on one style, their commitment to this vision is also part of their appeal. The lyrics, mostly penned by Beam, take delight in exploring death, torture, and general disfigurement from every angle. When the Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad accompanies Jones on the title track, their call-and-response helps the subject matter ascend toward something communal, ready to shouted back at them. The message is plain: The human body is disgusting. Man’s capacity for evil knows no limits. The end is near and always looming closer. Undeath excel by soundtracking these thoughts through pitch-perfect metal bursting with energy. For them, death is only the beginning.
0 comments:
Post a Comment