The moderately tame spray of drum kicks is punctuated by gentle brushes on the cymbals. The head attached to my neck is moving forward and back instead of a typically canted vertical motion. Permeating this, the commentary of abstract gurgling, staring at it’s shoes, hands in pockets.
What does all of this mean? It means that I am listening to a new slam album.
Dallas’s Devourment set goals. They aim to make an album that achieves a criteria only possible in this field of music. This brand of slam death metal was the brain child of Dying Fetus, and regardless of the fact that Unleash The Carnivore ranks no where close to the quality of the former band’s output, I have a fundamental respect for this iteration of the death metal canon.
Death Metal is a protracted affair, methodical in it’s construction, and often charged with being purely an aesthetical genre. One can expect dissonant picking, diabolical scales, and above all, a sense of composition. The genre is mostly an earphone experience, and one that inspires hilarious youtube videos of death metal aficionados not knowing quite what the fuck to do at a concert except stand there and figure it out. At the other venue, the too hip hardcore kids are having more fun, and probably driving home with cheerleaders in their convertibles. Devourment abolish this and demand that you feel a rhythm under the groove of tracks like “Fed To The Pigs” and the abominable “Over Her Dead Body”. This brutality is purposeful, and brings to light the fact that with music made to be so goddamn antagonistic, it should inspire a visceral physical response; get fucking moving.
Unleash The Carnivore represents a new lease on life for Devourment after the sterile Butcher The Weak. They succeed at taking the abstracts of death metal out of the comfortable mind and violently throwing them into a primal and nasty environment. There is nothing to illuminate on regarding the riffs, percussion, or gutturals (although Mike Majewski and the un-jailed Ruben Rosas deliver truly destructive vocal performances), but that is the point. There is not much to distract from the streamlined agenda these eight tracks propagate.
This album, albeit confectionary, will not turn heads. It may snap their necks, but it is ultimately a curmudgeonly old man; it has been in the works long enough to know what it is, and it is not changing. It has simple needs, and expects you to have the same.
Note: Dan Seagrave and Par Olafsson turn in another legendary album design. If anything, the artwork is the biggest star of this release.
(6/10)
You may also dig: