LACERATION MANTRA: Prolonging the Pain

Produced by Laceration Mantra & Joe Panetta
Released: 2011

Brisbane has a proud history when it comes to death metal and no band from that city stands out more than Misery and their bludgeoningly effective mixture of death, grind and doom. Featuring two of the people from that group in the shapes of guitarist Scott Edgar and drummer Anthony Dwyer, Laceration Mantra set to work in precisely the same relentless fashion.

Prolonging the Pain is non-stop bulldozing grind-flecked death metal from beginning to end. "Thrown to the Wolves" erupts with a brutal ferocity, with a stinging and savage guitar tone that is maintained throughout. Rob Rieff deploys some Benton-style double-tracked vocals and Edgar and second guitarist Michael Perry step up with some effective lead breaks in the likes of "Realisation", where a slower grind comes to the fore. "The Global Straitjacket" works in some tempo changes while Rieff's lyrics, unlike Edgar's previous outfit The Dead with their silly and occasionally non-sensical songs relating to gore topics, tackle themes like fear and manipulation. "Barney" shows the band's pure grind side as something of an ode to Napalm Death and there are also snatches of classic Morbid Angel apparent. Like the best bands though, Laceration Mantra don't merely ape their influences or regurgitate their history. They adopt them into a style of their own that is fast, brutal and menacing.

Prolonging the Pain is a fine addition to the local death metal landscape. The intensity of the delivery echoes the great Australian death metal tradition of bands like Misery and Psychrist and this can sit beside albums by those bands in comfort.

1. Thrown to the Wolves
2. Purveyors of Torment
3. The Innermost
4. Victims of Hate
5. Realisation
6. The Global Straitjacket
7. Surreal Reality
8. Prolonging the Pain
9. Barney
10. Blinders

Rating: 78%

THE DEAD: The Dead

Produced by The Dead

Released: 2007

The Dead is the continuation of a Queensland heritage, containing as it does guitarist Scott Edgar from the now-defunct Misery, one of the greatest Aussie death metal bands of all. It would be easy to suggest from a cursory listen that his new band is merely a resurrection of his old one, but this would be a mistake. That there are similarities cannot be denied but there are some idiosyncracies evident on this album that delineate these bands and it has to be said that The Dead come off as somewhat inferior.

Edgar and vocalist Michael Yee have been doing this sort of thing longer than almost anyone and there's no doubt they know what this is all about, and The Dead churns out enough solid, meat-and-potatoes death metal to keep any fan more than satisfied. The production tends to be a little demo-ish at times (rather like the artwork), but fits rather well with the band's unadorned style. The bass is surprisingly audible (perhaps because the bassist mixed this) but strangely toppy and thin while Edgar's guitar retains the huge sludgy sound he used in Misery and the drumming is mostly blastbeats. In the end however, The Dead falls a bit short. Apart from the last song, the earth-shaking and doom-laden "The Doomsayer" that more than any other track here evokes the shadow of Misery, there isn't really much in the way of a real stand-out and the material suffers a little from the rather cliched lyrical matter and cheesy titles like "Onslaughter" and "Raging Violence"; no matter how many times I see it, "They Eat Their Wounded" just strikes me as a silly thing to call a song and it makes me laugh out loud everytime. Lyrically The Dead doesn't really rise above the usual tales of serial killings, murder sprees and demonic invasions of so many other bands and at times they don't seem that well thought out: "a killing kind of war" suggest there's some other kind and "The dead are alive/Crucifixions burning inside them" appears to make no sense. The Dead is also very short: with nine songs it still only clocks in at just on half an hour, which is shorter than a Misery album and that's saying something.

The Dead is a competent album of unrelenting death metal, the kind you would expect from a couple of scene veterans, but there isn't that much to it and doesn't stand out at all from any of the hundreds of others like it.

1. Hunting Humans
2. Onslaughter
3. Raging Violence
4. Nameless Entity
5. The Dead
6. Drown in Sin
7. They Eat Their Wounded
8. A Killing Kind
9. The Doomsayer

Rating: 55%

MISERY: On Demon Wings

Produced by Misery

Released: 2007

Few bands were as consistent as Brisbane veterans Misery. They never really changed much from album to album. While for some bands that meant becoming really repetitive by their third or fourth album, it was always Misery’s style and approach that remained the same, not their material. For them, each release was wall to wall with dark, cataclysmic death metal, but mixed up with a bit of doom and tempered ever so slightly by melody. Really, Misery was the closest any Australian band got to perfecting the ultimate death metal template cut by Morbid Angel, and only isolation and constant record label problems stopped the rest of the world from appreciating them.

So we come to their fourth and, sadly, final album, On Demon Wings. Recorded in 2005 but unreleased until 2007 by emerging Brisbane extreme label Obsidian, On Demon Wings shows that the transition from four-piece to trio with the departure of guitarist Laz Khananghinis had no adverse effect on Misery’s music. This has all the hallmarks of the band’s distinctive brand of metal: the dark guitar sound, the grinding riffs, Damon Robinson’s tomb-throated vocals, slower, doom-ridden passages and occasional bursts of melody and groove.

The title track is built on a monolithic descending riff as slow as it is monstrous; “Butchered” is even slower, almost pure doom-death with Robinson sounding like the door to a crypt creaking slowly open. Elsewhere of course, Misery play pretty fast, sometimes coming close to grind. Again, this is exactly the type of trick this band became known for, but most importantly of all, On Demon Wings is just as good as anything they’ve done before. Pick any track on here, from “Priest” to “Burning Hatred” and what you get is nothing less than crushingly heavy, demonic death metal of the highest quality.

Misery was one of the country’s best metal bands and On Demon Wings shows how much they will be missed.

1. Priest
2. On Demon Wings
3. Twisting the Knife
4. Blood of Ancients
5. Butchered
6. Ill of the Dead
7. Disciples of War
8. The Black Arts
9. And They They Die
10. In Tongues
11. Burning Hatred

Rating: 85%