LIST: 10 MOST ANTICIPATED BANDS of MARYLAND DEATHFEST

I love making lists. In fact, that probably why I was offered the role of Oskar Schindler, in Schindler’s List. I said, “Steven [Spielberg], I make lists all the time.” And he said, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.” (My next list will be HBO shows that I quote from too often, starting with this quip from Liam Neeson in Life’s Too Short.)

Before I let the rabbit out of the hat or the cat out of the bag or whatever other animal cliche fits here with my TOP 50 EXTREME ALBUMS OF THE YEAR, I wanted to start with a list of the bands I’m looking forward to seeing most at Maryland Deathfest. It’s my first year attending, so I’ll be targeting international bands who don’t tour often, and a few North American bands who have evaded me thus far:

10) Noothgrush. Recently missed them playing in Brooklyn, and you never know how long it will be before these West Coast sludge-slingers visit the borough again. If there was a split album you enjoyed over the last 17 years they were probably involved.

9) Bongripper. I love the Chicago doom scene, and there’s nobody in the Midwest who can touch the bleakness of Hate Ashbury and Satan Worshipping Doom.

8) Crowbar. I traded Monster Magnet’s Powertrip album for Crowbar’s Obedience Thru Suffering back in junior high school, and it went down as one of the best trades of all time.

7) Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. With so much screaming and growling, this UK band’s brand of macabre doom rock will be a reprieve from extremity. Great songs that avoid that lazy “retro” tag people love and just provide great hooks and a sense of mystery.

6) The Secret. I still think Solve et Coagula is one of the more underrated albums out there, and I’ve missed my chance at seeing this Italian band several times in Brooklyn. NOT THIS TIME.

5) Coffins. Blurring that line between death metal and sludge, their music seems like the perfect soundtrack for swimming through a pond of entrails. With the government holding up work/travel VISAs to the point where Church of Misery cancelled their NYC show earlier this year, any time a band I dig from Japan heads this way I make sure to attend.

4) My Dying Bride. I always loved the sense of sophistication and drama they brought to doom, and Turn Loose the Swans was one of the first albums that persuaded me to embrace slower-tempo genres back when I was a grindcore maniac in high school.

3) Gorguts. Unfortunately I’ll be missing their show at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn in December, so MDF offers me a chance to see a band whose comeback has given us Colored Sands, an album I feel even surpasses the legendary Obscura in terms of vision, focus, and grandiosity.

2) At the Gates. Since the first time I heard an old Earache records sampler, I was infatuated with Tomas Lindberg’s bark and the melodic savagery of Slaughter of the Soul.

1) The Church of Pungent Stench. Not only does the Been Caught Buttering album art adorn my battle vest, but Martin Schirenc is the culprit for igniting my adoration for death metal. I love his Hollenthon project as well, but it obviously starts with the gruesome excess of Pungent Stench.

Check out the full list of bands over at the Maryland Deathfest website, and tell me how wrong I am about this list:  https://www.marylanddeathfest.com/

REVIEW: TRAPPED WITHIN BURNING MACHINERY - THE PUTRID STENCH OF DECAYING SELF

Okay, so the band name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and I was mostly expecting some harsh industrial music, just because I’m a dope and the word “Machinery” is in it. If someone played this album for me and asked me to guess a band name based on the music I would blurt out, “Rotting Lamentation.” As you can see, there’s a reason nobody comes to me to name bands anymore. My last suggestion was Nuncuddle.

Trapped Within Burning Machinery play dense, somber music that incorporates equal parts blackened doom, trudging death, and the most sluggish sludge. Honestly, I didn’t expect so much melody and so many gentle moments from an album with both “stench” and “decaying” in the title. As you can see, I judge books by their covers like it’s my god damn job, because it occasionally is. This is one instance where the element of surprise was very appreciated by this dreary reviewer. I’m not sure if they have bogs in Moreno Valley, CA, but this music feels like it rose from the muck of a long-forgotten cemetery that sunk into swamplands long ago, and these songs are the spirits clawing their way through the moss and algae. It’s powerful stuff, in turns heavy and harmonious, all driven by an enormous wall of darkened guitar fuzz and the strangled, chilling scream of Zak Esparza.

“Parasitic Mind Decomposition” actually alarmed me a bit, as I had a friend overcome brain surgery following an infestation of pork parasites in his brain. It’s one of those insane ultra-metal moments that thankfully had the happiest ending possible with his recovery, and now finally (thanks to this band) has an official soundtrack. “Smoldering Enclave” features thick, meaty riffs that remind me of Pungent Stench’s best work on For God Your Soul, For Me Your Flesh before quieting the assault to a whisper during a disarmingly soft interlude. “Industrial Snuff,” besides being an awesome title that Shin'ya Tsukamoto should totally steal for another Tetsuo film, was my favorite track on the album. It grooves like Eyehategod’s bluesy sludge but if you pick the crusty scab there’s still the black blood beneath and the core of tortured doom. Still, there are moments of light on this album and it’s a fully textured emotional experience. The music may sound like it’s from some godless swamp filled with the bones of massacred families, but it’s also surrounded by lovely apple blossoms, if you make it out of the swamp alive.

There are a few passages that didn’t fully engage me (“Plague of Aeon’s” and “Violent Veins” both tested my patience at times), but The Putrid Stench of Decaying Self is still a tremendous album. If you like earthy doom like Usnea that can block out the sun and cover the world with darkness this is most certainly for you. Just leave yourself a breadcrumb trail if you venture into this bog, you may not make it out again to offer more crappy band name suggestions like I did.

Listen to The Putrid Stench of Decaying Self over on Bandcamp, available for download and CD purchase for a modest $5:  http://trappedwithinburningmachinery.bandcamp.com

And follow them on Facebook, where I learned they are headed to the studio to make more music to hurt our feelings:  https://www.facebook.com/trappedwithinburningmachinery

Also, hat tip to my friend Ellie for pointing me towards this album. She makes beautiful metal vests and could probably sell them for $500 each if any rich kids wanna go see Coffinworm and look troo. I hope to showcase her art on here at some point, she’s vastly talented and recently had a (temporary) Iron Lung tattoo across her knuckles. Bad ass.

REVIEW: DESECRATION - MIXTAPE

Listening to Desecration’s mixtape, a free sample of cuts from their 20 year discography, is like watching a predator adapt to its surroundings in reverse. It sort of reminds me of the animals in the upcoming film After Earth, where the planet and all its creatures have become more and more efficient as killing humans. Except with Desecration you don’t get some shitty Shyamalan twist, you get exactly what you came to the party for: Lethal doses of sinister Welsh death metal, sharpened like a backwoods chainsaw.

Beginning with two songs each from Forensix and Process of Decay, Desecration show their most polished work first, with hooks that dig into your softest brain flesh and haunt you all day. “Sadosexual Suicide” grinds and batters the listener with blastbeats while remaining one of the catchiest death metal songs I’ve ever heard. There is a ton of groove in the chorus riffs off those albums, contributing an anthemic quality seen in the most addictive songs from Exhumed and Pungent Stench. “Raping the Corpse” celebrates the perversions of Ed Gein with pummelling Tomb of the Mutilated fury, reminding me that once upon a time Roberts Blossom, who played Old Man Marley in Home Alone, played a barely-fictional version of Gein in the film Deranged. “To Kill With A Drill” stomps defiantly, offering the finest batch of memorable riffs in the collection as vocalist/guitarist Ollie Jones unleashes razor-wire sharp licks. Part of the joy of listening to Desecration is the celebration of violent grindhouse-style films, like the winks at Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer, which make a horror geek like me geek out even more.

“Dig Up, Dig In” commences with the eerie snarl of flies blanketing some swollen, disgusting cadaver before launching into grinding death. “Murder in Mind” and “Turning Black” cover similar territory, exploring the grind-groove-grind formula they’ve exploited with great success throguh their entire blood-drenched career. “Crave For Rot” ends with the most primitive production quality, but the song beneath the murk is stellar, with the lead guitar squealing over foreboding doom before speeding to a downright evil breakdown closing out the mix. There’s legitimately something for every death metal fan here. If you can’t boogie to “Bacterial Breakdown” then I’m going to need you to cut that Carcass back patch off your vest right now, chief. Desecration definitely lean towards old-school death metal, limiting technical flourishes while focusing on concise songwriting, controversial content, and songs that will inspire pit-rage and dislodged vertebrae. It’s a helluva lot of fun, as long as you’re not the corpse they’re defiling in each song. Actually, how the hell do I know, it might be fun for the corpse too.

This mix is available on Bandcamp as a “name your price” download. If you like what you hear support the band, you know how it works. Also, look for Desecration to be featured in my upcoming article for Decibel Magazine, I’ll post more details when the release date for the issue has been confirmed. Many thanks to Ollie for taking the time to answer some of my desperate “FIVE DAYS TO MY DEADLINE OMG” questions.

Listen to Desecration over here on Bandcamp: http://desecration.bandcamp.com/album/free-desecration-mixtape

And check out their website for gig dates and merch:  http://www.desecration.co.uk/