REVIEW: MUMAKIL - FLIES WILL STARVE

So I learned a lot this morning by deciding to review Mumakil’s upcoming album Flies Will Starve today. First, they’re named after a fictional Tolkien beast, those six-tusked two-hundred feet tall elephant creatures who royally fuck shit up in Return of the King. I found a poem written about one by Samwise the Hobbit and he has a totally amateur grasp of poetic forms and rhyme schemes, incapable of capturing their enormous fury the way this band has. I then researched the life cycle of flies and discovered that most don’t live for more than a month, and can starve after just a few days. This confirmed my disdain for these pesky little jerks for buzzing around my eyeballs during the summer, as if they have nothing better to do with their thirty days on this planet.

The members of Mumakil use their time alive with a higher purpose: Blistering their fingers and snapping your neck with ferocious grind that will pry your ear canal open and funnel in anthrax. From the confident first blast of “Death From Below” you can tell this ain’t Mumakil’s first ride at the rodeo. They’ve been assaulting the world from their Swiss lair in Geneva since 2004, releasing several split albums and three full-lengths, including Flies Will Starve, their second with Relapse Records. They have used every moment of the past nine years conceiving ways to injure you with the sound screaming from their amplifiers and off their percussive devices. With 24 tracks it would require a manifesto of Tolkien proportions to accurately describe all of the lethal techniques used on this monster, but some highlights of their multi-faceted attack include: The stop’n’start trauma of “War Therapist,” the thrashing groove of “Waste By Definition,” and the technical death wizardry of “Fucktards Parade.” There’s definitely more than a pinch of tech-death here, as the riffs often have as much in common with Nile or Decapitated as they do label-mates Brutal Truth or Rotten Sound. But Mumakil really is its own (six-tusked) animal.

This is the catchiest blast of 200+ BPM sonic anger I’ve heard in an elephant’s age. Elephants live a long time, right? About a billion times longer than flies? My lazy internet searches and lazier math confirm this is true. It’s just exciting to hear a band building grind on riffs rather than blastbeats (but if it’s blastbeats you want, good lord, does Kevin Foley not disappoint you) and actually forming these crazy things called songs. Somewhere along the way, a group of near-sighted people obsessed with guidelines and mind-numbing consistency decided there were rules for grindcore, and those rules are only allowed to be broken if you increase the average song speed by X amount. By its nature, grindcore is a genre that should be forever evolving, restlessly searching for new weapons. Thankfully, all of the bands worth a damn took that rule book, said “No thanks” as impolitely as possible, and set it ablaze with a mouth full of bathtub bourbon and a lit Molotov. They may not challenge perceptions of grindcore (and reality) as defiantly as someone like Pig Destroyer, but Mumakil is absolutely one of those bands.

This album releases in late June, right around my birthday. This will definitely be spinning while I blow out my cake candles, lit from the same burning grindcore rulebook.

Check out more information on Mumakil over at their profile on Relapse Records, including how t pre-order this beast:  http://www.relapse.com/label/artist/mumakil.html

And follow them on Facebook here:  https://www.facebook.com/Mumakil

REVIEW: BEYOND CREATION - THE AURA

I try not to obsess over traffic statistics for this site even though I am a numbers junkie, caused by years of playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball with my father and perusing obscure career stats from New York Mets bench players. That being said, I can’t help but notice that my readership in Canada is lower than my readership in Germany, despite the fact that I’ve covered bands across the great North while I’ve yet to review a German release. Enter Montreal’s Beyond Creation, who I’m relying on to make my Canadian readership EXPLODE and make me as popular as maple syrup, or whatever stereotypical treat my ignorant American ass relates to Canada.

Beyond Creation’s new album from Season of Mist, The Aura, is a fresh pulse of time-warping progressive death metal that should probably be traded person to person through a media format that hasn’t been invented yet, like transferrable brain chips or spinal download disks, which slide between vertebrae and fuse music directly with your neural system. Beyond Creation’s brand of next century’s technical death displays virtuosity without distracting from the songs, allowing ample room for exploration while the structures keep each track contained in its own definite universe. The music on The Aura is elastic and borderline aquatic in nature, swimming naturally from extra-terrestrial djent to finger-blurring death metal riffing to what I like to call “progressive space jams.” No, they do not feature the most dynamic basketball players of the 90s and WB cartoons, but they do have passages of radar-pinging guitars and a bass tone that sounds like the bellow of some intergalactic worm-whale while  resourceful drumming slyly twists beneath. But these are only brief escapes from Beyond Creation’s sinister pummel and mathematic trickery, brought to life through vastly impressive performances from the entire band. From Dominic 'Forest' Lapointe’s nimble bass work (which calls forth memories of Roger Patterson’s best work in Atheist) to Simon Girard’s on-point vocal attack to the Kevin Chartré/Girard tag-team guitar assault, this is top notch progressive death metal executed with spit, sweat, and whatever fluid will replace blood a thousand years in the future.

The only song that felt uninspired was “Omnipresent,” which shifts from mid-tempo chugging to a bastardized “Snakes For the Divine” riff. This is the only song that doesn’t hold up under multiple listens, as The Aura rips through uncharted territory by achieving oxymoronic herky-jerky groove. Considering how many tempo shifts alter the path of each song the catchy nature of the music is, as Wallace Shawn would say, inconceivable. The instrumental track “Chromatic Horizon” rampages beautifully in my headphones while the title track manipulates my brain into head nodding motions, growing more violent as the song progresses. The album's centerpiece, “The Deported,” winds through outer space like one of those intergalactic worm-whales I mentioned earlier, surprisingly elusive for such a powerful beast. It’s rare to find death metal so cunning, so difficult to trap into a corner and identify before it bites your throat out.

Decibel Magazine revealed that Beyond Creation will be playing several dates of the magazine’s tour, opening for the three-headed killing machine that will be Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, and Immolation. If you’re able to catch them on the May 21st - June 2nd leg of the tour DO IT. I need you to report to me if they’re actually playing instruments light-beamed here from a distant planet populated with tentacled metalheads, because considering some of the rhythms and sounds on this album, that’s about all that makes sense.

Seek more Beyond Creation data here:  http://www.season-of-mist.com/bands/beyond-creation

The Aura releases in the United States on May 14th. Order this madness here:  http://e-shop.season-of-mist.com/en/items/beyond-creation/the-aura/cd/34199