Cephalic Carnage - Xenosapien
I’m glad I listened to Exploting Dysfunction recently as this recent Carnage album seems like a return to that kind of form in many ways, especially after the relatively disappointing Anomalies album. It again displays their doomcore sort of sound, with the death metal and grind elements given a new vigor and intensity that remind me of earlier work. Some of the workouts early in the album just blister through riffage, elevating the heart rate and getting the head working, and the heavy doom riffs do a good job of varying the tempo and dynamics more, giving the whole work a nice range. A great return to form.
Decapitated - Nihility
Listening to this young, talented and sadly disbanded band reminds me of just how utterly skilled these guys were, rattling through syncopated blastbeats and intricate riffing in perfect precision at an extremely high level of confidence. This is music in that same stratosphere or maybe I should say infernal depth where bands like Morbid Angel, Suffocation and the like dwell, with an almost symphonic level of layering and sophistication to back up the battery. I’m really looking forward to getting more familiar with their canon as they do seem to have at least three very strong studio records to their legacy.
Pig Destroyer/Gnob (split CD)
A rather staid affair for the most part, with a series of two minute shorts by Pig Destroyer that don’t immediately differentiate themselves from the rest of the band’s work, coming and going in blastbeats and shouting. Gnob almost seems like the band’s southern cousins who seem to be in this whisky rock sort of mode and have all those low octave riffs that move Black Sabbath (and in one case Cream) riffs around with the mission to find maybe that last variation the last 30 of the band’s contemporaries missed out on. Another 90s band clipping and trimming a certain vision of the 70s to specs.