NECROPHAGIA: Deathtrip 69

Released: May 2011

For all their influence on death metal, Necrophagia is probably still best known for featuring Phil Anselmo as their guitarist for a few years in the 90s, and even then most people knew them just for that reason, without bothering to find out what they actually sounded like. Twenty eight years into their fragmented career, becoming a household name is probably neither an achieveable nor desired goal, but it is about time that Necrophagia is recognised as the true pioneering act they are.

Killjoy’s raspy shriek was the prototype for a thousand death metal (and black metal) voices and he hasn’t lost his touch nor his love of the macabre. With Deathtrip 69 he has probably made his best album ever. The production in reminiscent of Symphonies-era Carcass and the guitar tone is razor sharp. This is straight-up old school death metal the way only someone who helped invent the form could play it, with clever, deceptive arrangements that only unfold the more you listen to them.

In keeping with previous releases, Necrophagia sprinkle plenty of well-chosen horror film samples throughout, with “Naturan Demonto” opening on a snippet from Evil Dead as the song itself lurches in slowly like some benighted terror. Catchy riffs abound in the likes of “Beast With Feral Claws” and “Suffering Comes in Sixes” and “Tomb With a View” opens with a wonderfully spooky intro that could have been lifted straight off the soundtrack of a 70s Hammer classic.

The genuinely haunting ambient interlude “A Funeral for Solange” breaks the album up nicely, offering a creepy respite before the punkish thrash of “Kyra” – a tribute to Kyra Schon, the little girl zombie in Night of the Living Dead – featuring a guest appearance by Casey Chaos, and the death metal gallop of “Bleeding Eyes of the Eternally Damned” that ends on some cool double-tracked guitar harmonies. These in turn give way to the heaviest tracks, “Trick ‘R Treat (The Last Halloween)” and “Deathtrip 69” with its Charles Manson sample and storyline. It’s all killer.

Deathtrip 69 shows a real master at work, showing the young guns and their clone army of palm-muted, guitars-as-percussion bands how real death metal should sound.

1. Naturan Demonto
2. Beast With Feral Claws
3. Tomb With a View
4. Suffering Comes in Sixes
5. A Funeral for Solagne
6. Kyra
7. Bleeding Eyes of the Eternally Damned
8. Trick 'r Treat (The Last Halloween)
9. Deathrip 69
10. Death Valley 69
Rating: 82%

SYMFONIA: In Paradisum

Produced by Timo Tolkki
Released: February 2011

As the editor of Loud Online, you’d think that I’d keep all the cream and palm off the crap to other writers. But as it turns out I apparently love listening to terrible heavy metal because here I am reviewing the latest turd from Timo Tolkki. Once the brains behind the most over-rated and overblown power metal band in Europe, Tolkki eventually departed Stratovarius after a spectacular nervous breakdown. With the inglorious passing of his subsequent Revolution Renaissance project, his latest vehicle is a band featuring cast-offs from every other power metal band that’s ever existed. Also featuring ex-Angra/Shaman/Looking-Glass Self vocalist André Matos, keyboard player Mikko Härkin from Sonata Arctica, ex-Stratovarius bassist Jari Kainulainen and drummer Uli Kusch from every band in Europe, Symfonia is exactly what you’d expect from a group so named and containing such people. And it sucks.

In a word, In Paradisum is rubbish. In a sentence, it’s predictable, un-imaginative, uninspiring and bland, featuring the same ideas Tolkki ran out of more than a decade ago. If the name of the band isn’t warning enough, the cover art should suffice. Graphics like this belong on Final Fantasy games, not metal albums. The songs are dreary, without a single original element. Matos sings way higher than any human should be allowed and while it’s a credit to him that he does so without actually going off-key, a register this high becomes annoying very, very quickly – and this album is almost an hour long. Kusch phones in his tracks and Kainulainen does pretty much what he always did: stands around in the background of promo shots. Härkin is allowed some of the spotlight but, let’s face it, Janne Wirman he ain’t. Naturally, the real focus is Tolkki, which is sad because, like Yngwie Malmsteen, he’s simply relying on his name alone these days. But at least Yngwie retains the ability to make your jaw hit the floor once in a while, often when you least expect it. Tolkki can’t be bothered, instead content to merely serve up ten tracks of risably awful power metal pap. Every track on here could have come from any of the bands that these guys have been in before and Kusch alone has made this album dozens of times, and much, much better. No wonder he doesn’t seem interested. Neither should anyone else.

1. Fields of Avalon
2. Come by the Hills
3. Santiago
4. Alayna
5. Forevermore
6. Pilgrim Road
7. In Paradisum
8. Rhapsody in Black
9. I Walk in Neon
10. Don’t Let Me Go

Rating: 20%

MORBID ANGEL: Illud Divinum Insanus

Produced by Trey Azagthoth
Released: June 2011

It’s quite possible that Illud Divinum Insanus is one of the most anticipated death metal releases for some time, next to the new Decapitated set. And it’s equally likely that it will also rank as one of the most disappointing albums in the annals of metal. Indeed, it’s already begun. It isn’t even out yet and there is already at least one Facebook group mourning the passing of Morbid Angel. For many people, this is the band that not only perfected death metal, but defines it. Yet in less than an hour, Trey Azagthoth and David Vincent have taken that legacy and tossed it away like the photo of an ex-girlfriend smeared with shit.

Terrible Latin aside, Illud begins ominously enough, with the portentous, Mussorgsky-like “Omni Potens” full of drum fills, dark-sounding strings and chanting. But after such an epic build up, the whole thing falls immediately flat with six and a half minutes of totally misguided, half-arsed industrialised bullshit like a bad Front Line Assembly cover band fucking the Genitorturers and coming up with Marilyn Manson, but worse. Like the time Dave Rotten decided that the world really needed a remixed Avulsed album, “Too Extreme!” fails on every level, including the title, which is more like something Devin Townsend would call a song.

And there’s worse to come. “Radikult” is just terrible urban hip-hop that Trey probably found on the backseat of a cab after Rob Zombie had deliberately left it there. But even that pales in awfulness compared to “Destructos Vs. the Earth/Attack”, something else you’d expect more from Townsend, but only if he woke up one day without any talent. It’s too stupid even for him. And lame. Really, really lame.

The thing is that there are Morbid Angel tracks here. Both “Nevermore” and “Beauty Meets Beast”, stupid title aside, are as ferocious and filled with those typical Azagthoth slab-riffs as anything they’ve done in the past, and “Blades of Baal” has a killer breakdown groove. The real shame is that the first-mentioned pair of songs come in way too late, at eight and nine respectively, to be any real saving grace. Most of the band’s fans will probably have thrown it across the room in disgust by then, and the rest will still be picking themselves up off the floor from the fits of laughter induced by the idiotic “Destructos” and its ridiculous “Marching! We are marching! Destructos are marching on Man!” refrain like something out of an Ed Wood film written by a nine year old. Even the songs that aren’t poor attempts at cross-genre pollution are not very good: “I am Morbid” and “10 More Dead” wouldn’t have even been good enough to be on Heretic. And saddest of all, David Vincent’s voice has gone from sounding like a haunted tomb opening to the generic, unscary growl of the denizens he once inspired.

Some are already calling this the St. Anger of death metal, but that’s not accurate. St. Anger was the sound of a band trying to hold something together as their world went to pieces. Illud Divinum Insanus is that of a band crashing spectacularly and not even realising, and unlike Metallica, Morbid Angel don’t even have the rigours of immense fame to blame. Metallica spent three albums and more than a decade on devolving their sound; Morbid Angel has done it in one stroke, for no apparent reason.

Morbid Angel really only has one option now. They need to call the next album Just Kidding and come out with the most evil-sounding record of all time. But they won’t, because it sounds like they just don’t care.

1. Omni Poten
2. Too Extreme!
3. Existo Vulgoré
4. Blades for Baal5. I Am Morbid
6. 10 More Dead
7. Destructos Vs. Earth/Attack
8. Nevermore
9. Beauty Meets Beast
10. Radikult
11. Profundis - Mea Culpa

Rating: 25%

DEAD CITY RUINS: Midnight Killer

Released: May 2011

According to their bio, Melbourne's Dead City Ruins sound like a "hard rock mixture of Black Sabbath and Alice in Chains", which would be true if either of those groups sounded like AC/DC.
As it is, this album shows these rock n roll bastards to rock out with the same sort of gusto as Sydney's similarly-named and equally rock-as-fuck motherfuckers Hell City Glamours. Midnight Killer is basically eight tracks of blazing, hard n' fast rock 'n roll of the good old fashioned no-bullshit kind. "Where You Gonna Run" kicks things off with an impossibly catchy riff that actually recalls early 80s The Angels and from that moment the Ruins offer up a continuous feast of hooky choruses and kick ass songs.

The riff in "Damn My Eyes" is a killer; indeed it's hard to find one that isn't. The appropriately-named "Blues" is a nice slow burner toward total rock mayhem and drummer Drewsy gives "Highway Girl" a unbeatable pop swing. Vocalist Jake has an archetypal untrained wail that puts every song on the limit of control. Mix in a duck's arse tight rhythm section and Tommy's sharp lead guitar breaks and you can't go wrong. Dead City Ruins are the real deal. They rock, they rock hard, and Midnight Killer is a ripper.

1. Where You Gonna Run
2. Damn My Eyes
3. My Lai Massacre
4. Midnight Killer
5. Blues
6. Go to War
7. Highway Girl
8. Fallen

Rating: 80%

BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME: The Parallax: The Sleep Dialogues

Produced by David Bottrill and BTBAMReleased: April 2011
Strap yourselves in. That’s what it should say on the cover of every Between the Buried and Me release, and on this new EP it should be bolded and underlined. "The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues" is the opening chapter of what is promised to be a two-part suite of their idiosyncratic uber-cerebral metal, and if you’ve been on one of their journeys before then you know that this is going to be some ride.

Teaming up with mega-producer David Bottrill – who’s worked with no lesser names than TOOL, Muse and Dream Theater – has helped pull together the various strands of BTBAM’s divergent influences and proclivities to make these three immense tracks rather more seamless than the occasionally too-contrived The Great Misdirect. The complicated twists and turns, genre- and mood-shifts and sweeping arrangements do, of course, remain and there’s no real telling where the band is likely to go as the EP unfolds over a mere thirty minutes. It certainly isn’t casual listening lyrically either, as the deep and elaborate concept of interconnected dream-lives is possibly even more complex than the music. With regards to that, the band is at the top of their game and appear to be pushing each other towards new heights of virtuosity every couple of minutes.

It’s probably just as well BTBAM has decided to make "The Parallax" only the first part of a larger concept, because after about half an hour of this, your head might explode.

1. Specular Reflection
2. Augment of Rebirth
3. Lunar Wilderness

Rating: 85%

HEAVEN THE AXE: Sex, Chugs & Rock n Roll

Released: May 2011

Readers who recognise the names Manticore, Damaged and Abramelin will know them as three of the most extreme Australian metal bands of all. So the idea of members of each of those bands teaming up together would certainly be an intriguing one for those of us who remember or have ever been exposed to their brutality. And that's why Heaven the Axe is probably not the band you would expect them to play in.

Formed in Wagga Wagga as a straight-up rock band by Steve Watts and Phoebe Pinnock, after the pair moved to Melbourne Watts linked up with old buddies from the metal scene there and gradually moulded Heaven the Axe into a much heavier band. Sex, Chugs & Rock n'Roll is the result of that tinkering, nine tracks of explosive, sexy heavy rock.

Pinnock is a brazenly honest songwriter and her lyrics range from the angry ("Enemy") to the heartfelt ("Unconditional Love") to cheeky fun like "So Nirvana" in which she likens the local hoon hottie to the classic Nirvana line-up like a naive, coquettish schoolgirl. This song is HtA at their poppiest and shows their clear commercial potential. The ballad "Unconditional Love" has an almost Kasey Chambers vibe until it starts to really rock out about the two minute mark and the question has to be asked: Why isn't this song all over the radio? Elsewhere, Sex, Chugs & Rock n Roll is sheer rock heaven, but with a ferociously metal guitar sound and incredible heaviness that could only come from guys who used to play in death metal bands. Indeed, at times it seems like Pinnock's chirpy albeit powerful voice is almost too pop for the savagery of the rest of the band, and yet it just clicks.

Despite its poppy hooks, Sex, Chugs & Rock n Roll is probably too heavy to become a chart hit but it should become a solid favourite for those who like rock, because that's what it does.

1. Enemy
2. Masochist
3. Electric Wire
4. So Nirvana
5. (GI-intro)
6. Glue
7. Get Your Devil to Do It
8. Unconditional Love
9. Tails to You
 
Rating: 70%