Sunday 24 July 2011

DON'T MISS IT: DISMA & WE ARE THE DAMNED

Unlike the majority of genres, united under the extreme music banner, death metal rarely ‘suffers’ from ‘more of the same’ which in many cases is more a promise for the quality of a given record, and New Jersey’s freaks Disma demonstrate it by summoning up those old demons on their debut full-length. They’re the newest and freshest corpse buried in Profound Lore’s lurid crypt and as everyone who has somehow managed to retain his sanity knows, once you enter its narrow, unlit tunnels, you either leave them with well shaken psyche, or remain walled in between these ancient stones forever. So it’s obvious that whatever happens on ‘Towards The Megalith’ (some sadist has decided to stream the album), it happens in completely different reality. Disma are composed of professional death metal occultists, the most obvious being ex-Incantation frontman Craig Pillard, whose deep growls always sound like the last painful cry of a dying mammoth and form terrifying Impetuous Ritual-like atmosphere. Walking through the halls of his sick imagination guarantees loads of twisted visions that remind of his classic appearance on ‘Onwards To Golgotha’, an album that, as if you need to be told, paved the way for 90% of the satanic death metal hordes. The riffs are simple, massive and addictive, absorbing the early '90s traditions in goat warship and the spirit of new leaders like Portal, Mitochondrion and Vastum. ‘Towards The Megalith’ is an audio gate to the haunted post-apocalyptic world.


And while Disma consume souls slowly but inevitably like some ancient evil, Portuguese terrorists We Are The Damned explode suddenly, deafeningly and deadly, leaving only ashes behind them. ‘Holy Beast’ has everything a secondLP can need – power, clever song-writing, intentions, insisting yearning to prove itself and of course, conviction. Hardcore dynamics meet death 'n' roll nastiness on killer songs that sound so concentrated on the surface, but immediately storm chaos in the mind, make you unable to control your pulse, and more importantly – your actions. They have to be here, representing the entire anger of our societies and pulling out one of 2011’s key albums. ‘Holly Beast’ simply demands extreme responses.

1 comment:

  1. "Holy Beast" is WATD's second album. The first one is called "The Shape Of Hell To Come".

    Cheers.

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