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: SERVANTS OF THE MIST - SUICIDE SEX PACT

Tampa, FL may not seem like the doom capital of the world, with their sunshine and delicious oranges and all that, but then a band like Servants of the Mist comes along with Suicide Sex Pact, an EP so bleak and filthy that it blocks the light traveling from dying stars and rots fruit from the trees.

From the opening uneasy clean singing of a passage from “Jesus Loves Me,” which captures the same creepy melancholia as Harvey Milk’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Servants of the Mist create a world where light is long-extinct and hope’s been violently snuffed. Album opener “Absence” introduces their scorched funeral doom, which sounds like the aural equivalent of finger painting with urn ash on a canvas of stretched skin torn from a dead priest’s back. This sort of pitch-black doom inspires thoughts of Bongripper and Cough, mixed with the drama of early My Dying Bride.

“Behind the Curtain” continues the band’s glacial determination with uncompromising heaviness. I wasn’t able to truly conceive of canyons being carved by icy structures until I heard the riff in this song. It feels a little like Evoken, if their songs were trapped in endless hallucinogen-fueled night terrors. The lead guitar in this song and album closer “Suicide Sex Pact” didn’t feel totally committed, with wavering hints of bluesy groove that fizzle instead of sizzle. This is the only aspect of the latter two songs that make me question if they totally earn the song length (none of the songs are briefer than 9 minutes). Fortunately, I’m willing to forgive 2 minutes among 30 when the rest of the album features guitar fuzz thicker than a blanket used to smother plague victims in their sleep. Richard Smyth Jr.’s vocals could scrape muscle from bone like an autopsy instrument, with curdling shrieks and meaty growls that give way to a no-wave gothic chant about 25 minutes into the album for a brief reprieve from ferocity. The breakdown of slow motion death rock slams back into relentless tomb-smashing doom before the feedback lifts like smoke and dust, revealing a pile of lifeless nude bodies.

With audio collage work reminiscent of Eyehategod’s more experimental passages and a muscular, bass-heavy attack that invokes Primitive Man and Conan, Suicide Sex Pact should interest fans of the loud, mean, and ugly. Maybe those aren’t adjectives I’d use on a dating profile, but when it comes to extreme metal, that’s love at first sight.

Go check out Servants of the Mist on Facebook and follow their updates as release information surfaces for Suicide Sex Pact:  https://www.facebook.com/servantsofthemist

Check out a preview of the title track over here: https://soundcloud.com/hbnbm/servants-of-the-mist-suicide

REVIEW: PRIMITIVE MAN - SCORN

While “man” be in the name of recent Relapse-signee Primitive Man, this music sounds like it was created by a malevolent force of nature, not just mortals with a mean streak. With members from Clinging To The Trees of A Forest Fire and Reproacher, this Denver, CO outfit have the credentials and gut-churning aggression to turn heads and cave skulls in the extreme metal community until the world cracks beneath the power of Jonathan Campos’ bass. The suffocating doom of Scorn, their first full-length set to be re-released by Relapse in August, sounds like the roar of all the earth’s mud and crude oil bubbling with rage, prepared to swallow us whole.

This album is one of the most unpleasant and downright frightening listening experiences of the year, crawling forward like an ancient beast pressing its muzzle to the ground to scavenge fields of bones and pooled blood. Opening with the album’s namesake, “Scorn” launches into tortured sludge that salivates on the border of funeral doom, invoking the misanthropy of Bongripper and the sluggish menace of Oak. While there’s definitely a monochromatic element to some of their pieces, like in “Antietam” and “Rags,” the album still mines the full spectrum of sound for texture. From jangly dissonance (“Scorn”) to challenging sound collages and atmospheric creepiness (“I Can’t Forget” and “Black Smoke”) and uptempo bursts of crust (“Stretched Thin” and “Astral Sleep”), Primitive Man possess a lot of knowledge about what nightmares are made of, and how to haunt you with them.

While doom bands often live and die by the enormity of their riffs, the strong drumming of Isidro Soto and Ethan Lee McCarthy’s hope-shredding vocals truly propel Scorn to full momentum. McCarthy sounds like the raspy snarl of that previously mentioned scavenging beast, broadcast through the thick static of a ham radio. Primitive Man may not write especially memorable songs when examined individually, but the album creates a dense, unforgettable experience that feels like you’re drowning in prehistoric tar pits, flanked by the preserved carcasses of mammoths and cavemen alike. Scorn is intense, primal, and would tunnel through the earth just to watch it implode on itself.

As mentioned before, parts of this album certainly plod and if you’re an impatient listener you may not fully appreciate the vastness of Scorn’s bleak sound, but if you’re a fan of slow-burn doom titans like Sunn O))) and Ufomammut and don’t mind a chaser of cold black bile, Primitive Man is ready to rip your day in half and fill it with riffs that could scrape the skin and religion off a dying priest.

Relapse releases Scorn on August 20th, and Primitive Man is currently touring  Go to their official website here for tour dates and merch:  http://primitivemandoom.com/

And check them out on Facebook to stay current with all band-related news:  https://www.facebook.com/primitivemandoom

REVIEW: BONGRIPPER / CONAN - SPLIT

Warning, this may be the first and last time Anne Hathaway has been referenced in a doom metal review. While AMC theaters were pushing promo hype for Les Miserables this past year I must have seen their 7 minute making-of featurette twenty times. It really didn’t matter what sort of movie I was seeing, AMC felt it was an appropriate regardless of genre. Nothing pumps you up for a bloody action flick or a supernatural chiller quite like Russell Crowe in a Napoleon hat. As much as I resented being forced to see this promo video so many times there was one line from Hathaway describing her ill-fated character that came to mind while listening to the Bongripper/Conan split album: “She's literally at the bottom of a hole and realizing she's never going to climb out of this.”

There’s a prevailing sense of hopelessness in both of these tracks, but Bongripper’s Side B offering “Zero Talent” truly captures the horrific disintegration of joy. Even the song title feels like someone who has cut their own worth down to nothingness. The track begins with droning ambience, like a room-tone in some desolate futurescape of dilapidated office buildings filled with skeletons where the only sounds are the computers that keep eerily humming. Once the riffs drop from the sky they land with enough force to sink continents. The guitars are weighed down by suffocating pessimism, crawling forward through glass shards and rat shit through cobbled streets where the dreamless wait to die. “Zero Talent” also pops an upper late in the song and rampages at about a million times their normal speed, blasting forward and suddenly halting with a vicious stop-and-go pattern that bruises brains like slapping the listener’s skulls against a truck windshield. It’s a nasty slab of grimy depression that should be the bright spot in every doom fan’s year.

Conon’s track, titled “Beheaded,” also plows through the muck at a frighteningly low speed, tasting the sewage as it shuffles deeper into a steaming fecal swamp. There was once a moment when I saw Winter play and felt like the distortion seeping from the towering speakers was crushing me into the ground. It was like the gravity in the venue was exponentially increasing each minute, threatening to flatten me across the cement floor and squeeze the precious fluids from my skin. Conan’s entire discography reproduces that feeling. If you’re looking for pure, unrelenting heaviness, the type of sound that feels like the widening anvil shadow right before impact, then Conan is your lethargic jam. While I usually think of decapitation as a swift punishment this song feels like someone is just pulling their enemy’s head off with their bare hands, working at it patiently with fingernails and brute strength. The song doesn’t offer much in riff ingenuity or tempo shifts, but it does transport listeners into a slow-motion world painted with dried blood and fresh shit. It’s not pretty or clean, but there are people who will feel completely at home there.

I also want to mention here that both of these bands will be terrorizing audiences in Conan’s home country, commencing a nine day tour towards the end of the month. If you can check out these bands and survive without feeling like their bass guitars laid a demon egg in your stomach I commend you.
 

Listen to Bongripper’s track here: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2013/03/exclusive-song-stream-bongripper-zero-talent/

And the Conan track is streaming yonder:  http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/15163-conan-beheaded/

And pre-order from Holy Roar Records over here: http://holyroarrecords.com/album.php?id=2010&shop=1