Mass Burial – Vomitory, Opus Mortis VIII

The last hurrah for Swedish death metal other guys Vomitory, Opus Mortis VIII, their eighth album if you didn’t know, was released in 2011. Apparently, the band had known ahead of time that this would be their last work, so a fair question winds up being whether or not they were going to leave anything undone in their careers: would this album be more of their standard, or would we see some new ideas since, with the band ending, the risk of alienating listeners would be pretty low.

Mass Burial – Vomitory, Carnage Euphoria

The penultimate Vomitory album feels like, in some ways, a return to the early Vomitory albums: Carnage Euphoria takes a few songs to get going, as the fourth track “Ripe Cadavers” is the first one that really gets my attention. “A Lesson in Virulence” is a good third song, a usual Vomitory trait, but this time, it’s a slower tune that appears in that slot and that for whatever reason keeps the album from taking off. “Rage of Honor,” “Deadlock” and closer “Great Deceiver” are also quality tunes.

Mass Burial – Vomitory, Terrorize Brutalize Sodomize

Five albums in, I think it’s safe to make some general statements on the career of the band. Vomitory plays death metal. Vomitory plays death metal very, very well. They have the brutality of the American scene and the melody and guitar work of their native Sweden. Lyrically, they cover a lot of the standard death metal bases of gore, violence and murder, and killing and demons, and war, not content to stick to one content approach like many other bands do. Truly, Vomitory is a smorgasbord of death metal, with something for everyone because everyone likes something.

Mass Burial –Vomitory, Primal Massacre

Album number five for the Swedish death metal machine that was Vomitory. Back in the old days of the early 2000s, I would stop at a local record store every single payday. I would get out of work, deposit my check (in the dark ages before we all had Direct Deposit, miracle that that is….) and head to the same store, regardless of where I was working. Maybe I’d put off my trip until I was on my way out for the evening, but regardless: like clockwork, every other Friday took me record shopping. I would walk around this store and look at practically any and every release that even appeared to be metal related. And every single trip would culminate with me buying a stack of new CDs, often times about one hundred dollars’ worth of new music at a time.

Mass Burial – Vomitory, Blood Rapture

Long, long ago, I owned two Vomitory records: this, from 2002, and its 2004 follow up Primal Massacre. I knew them both as quality death metal records, but was not at all familiar with the band as a unit.

Mass Burial – Vomitory, Revelation Nausea

Oh, 2001. A new millennium was upon us, but we had the same old Vomitory. Whatever that may mean to you, understand that I mean it in a positive way.

Revelation Nausea would feature another new vocalist, this time Erik Rundqvist, who would deliver the growls for the remaining Vomitory albums. His is a good, strong, satisfying death metal growl, closer to the style of Raped in Their Own Blood than Redemption.

Mass Burial –Vomitory, Redemption

The second record by Sweden’s Vomitory, “Redemption” was released in 1999.

Differences from Raped in Their Own Blood are noticeable immediately: the cover art has shifted over to the painted skeleton-in-a-crypt motif, away from the actual picture used for the first album. The music is a bit thrashier than the previous album, and oh, man, a new vocalist. Jussi Linna handles the vocal duties here, and I can’t find out much about him. It actually seems like a brief stint with Vomitory was his only real contribution to the metal scene.

Mass Burial – Vomitory, Raped in Their Own Blood

The first ever Child Sized Coffin discography project is dedicated to Swedish death metal band Vomitory. I have a little bit of familiarity with the band, having heard two of their albums a number of years ago,

Vomitory’s first album, 1996’s Raped in Their Own Blood, is a solid piece of mid-90s death metal. Everything about this album says ‘solid death metal’: the cover art is some fairly generic murder scene photo, the kind of thing that in 1996 would have been extreme and all, but looks pretty cheesy today. Ten songs of brutal, straightforward death metal, with the standard titles as well.

Coffin Shaker: Firespawn - Shadow Realms

Firespawn is the new project of former (I guess . . .) Entombed man L. G. Petrov, and is a 'supergroup' in a horribly loose sense of the term, comprised of some guys from Necrophobic and Unleashed and a bunch of other lesser Swedeath bands. One general complaint directed at the 'supergroup' is that it takes away from releases by the proper bands, and oh man, is that the case with this.

I'm not much of a fan of the more recent Entombed records, and I wasn't very interested in the recent Entombed A.D. release. I'm not really sure what Firespawn is trying to accomplish, but this record is 42 minutes of boring. It's almost like some old school death metal guys decided to put together an old school death metal-style album because old school death metal is intermittently a thing in the underground. Bands like Horrendous and Entrails, and even one-offs like Gruesome (another 'supergroup') get some steady press and praise, so why not try to cash in on that, especially if you're from Entombed, one of the ORIGINAL old school death metal bands, all the way from the old school days?

Slower, more mid-tempo grinding tunes on here, with some interesting riffs but nothing really worth sticking around for. After hearing this a few times, my only real response was "Man, I wish Necrophobic would put out another album." Honestlly, this isn't even good for that buzz you get from any of the better OSDM projects, or from actual old school death metal. The Emperor and Lucifer Has Spoken are pretty good tunes, but there's not too much reason to keep coming back to this one.

Coffin Shaker: Malevolent Creation - Invidious Dominion

I wanted to write about the new album Dead Man’s Path, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. A decent idea then, I thought, would be to write about its predecessor.

Malevolent Creation is one of those bands whose name I’d always known but never gave much of a chance, having settled in my mind that they were just another one of the early New York/Florida death metal bands, but one that didn’t really need a whole lot of my attention. After all, I have my bases covered with all the others, so I should be good, right? I knew a guy who was always pimping The Ten Commandments, but I just never gave the band much of a chance. Envenomed from 2000 caught my attention, and I’d been sort of on and off with the band ever since. Maybe a year and a half ago I decided I was going to devote some time to the bands’ discography, and I’m rather happy that I did.

Invidious Dominion is a solid release, displaying most of the hallmark traits of Malevolent Creation. It is straight to the point, no bells and whistles death metal with a great grinding sound. Malevolent Creation sounds like a table saw or some other type of power tool, and that is a very welcome quality in music for me. That is something that I really love about the old school death metal bands and records, that buzzsaw guitar sound. It’s a clean sound as well, making it apparent that the band knows what they’re doing and they want it to be heard. All metal bands have benefit from improved recording and mixing techniques.

Drumming is solid, the riffs are interesting. Vocally, Malevolent is still doing the murder and violence thing, which is fine. It is nice to have some different death metal subject matter once in a while, and getting away from the standard gore/zombie thing is nice. The vocals have that kind of sing-songy delivery at times, which I think is a Malevolent Creation hallmark. I like the way they arrange the lyrics to rhyme at the end of all the chorus lines, regardless of how that may cause the actual lyric to become a little hokey. Take, for instance, the chorus of Compulsive Face Breaker: “Get back up, piece of shit/Again your face I want to hit.” A lyrical masterwork if ever there was one. I know that with the kind of lame, slam/core cover art that type of tough guy lyric may be expected, but Malevolent isn’t one of those bands.

I have a hard time saying anything critical about this album. It is good, solid death metal, nothing fancy or experimental, nothing different or new, nothing bland or boring despite being the norm from the band. It’s short, around 35 minutes, and that time flies by. A really satisfying listen in the way that most of the third tier death metal bands usually are, so if something like Monstrosity floats your boat, or if you like other Malevolent Creation records, you’ll probably enjoy this. I keep putting it on because while it may not be anything innovative or new, it has that enjoyable quality that keeps dragging me back to listen to tracks like Target Rich Environment, United Hate and Compulsive Face Breaker again and again.

Coffin Shaker: Hate Eternal - Infernus

So, it’s been kind of a wild summer here at the Coffin. I got married at the end of May; I went on my honeymoon at the start of August. Of course I work, and the time between those great events was occupied by too much working. The result is that I’ve done a pretty poor job of establishing the Coffin and getting the operation running.

                My ultimate goal for this blog is to make room for a number of my personal interests, and so far, I’ve got the action figure part down. But my biggest love in life is, and always has been, music. The Internet has no shortage of music blogs, but now it needs to make room for mine.

                In reality, there will be room here for a couple of different genres of music, but for the most part things will be heavy metal or heavy metal-related. It won’t be all new records, but it will primarily be ones that catch my interest.

                So, I guess let’s give it a try.

Hate Eternal – Infernus

                This may break some rule of blogging, if such things exist, but here’s a little background on why this particular record has been for a few weeks now my choice to kick off the musical component of this blog. I truly love music. I’m sort of a music hoarder, having found in 2010 the marvels of a stable Internet connection and various alleyways for obtaining new music without that new music price tag. I’m sure we’ll get into all of that at some later time, but the immediate point is that over the last few years and thanks to technology, my music ‘collection’ has swollen to an amazing size, as I imagine is fairly normal. Before 2010 I had a huge collection of CDs and physical music, but the ease and convenience of digital music soon caught me. As a result, I’ve discovered tons of great new music and, at the same time but not as a result, I’ve lost track of certain bands I used to follow with at least a moderate interest.

                Hate Eternal is an example of the former. Eric Rutans’ death metal collective was something that I took great notice of in 2002 when King of All Kings was released, and that album is one that I would always recommend to people looking for a good tech-y death metal record. At that time, I was a real big fan of Jared Andersen as well, and then-drummer Derrick Roddy was then still a drummer of a different stripe, unlike in the present day where Derrick Roddy has all but become a style of drummer in death metal. Starting with their debut album Hate Eternal was hailed as something of a super group, right there in the early 2000s when a sticker proclaiming ‘super group’ was enough to garner a fair amount of press in the metal scene and at the record stores. That sticker was often enough to convince a younger me that the album attached to it was worth my money. The winter of 2002 saw King of All Kings in steady rotation, part of the soundtrack to wild and crazy nights.

                Releases after King of All Kings weren’t quite as interesting (or good), and my attention to the band waned. The super group label vanished, as subsequent iterations of the band were filled out by names you may know, but none that you were excited by. I flat out missed Pheonix Amongst the Ashes after the real mess that was Fury & Flames, an album that was difficult to listen to because of a terrible production. Infernus seemed like a good chance to give the band another chance, and I’m pretty happy that I did.

                The opening set of songs, Locust Swarm and The Stygian Deep, remind of all those terrific things about Hate Eternal from 2002: they’re fast, and they’re intense and chaotic. That’s a good, comfortable feeling for me with this band: the early 2000s saw a handful of these hyper-kinetic death metal releases that gave you that feeling of needing to grit your teeth and hold on to something for the first song or two, trying to navigate a salvo of wildness that would eventually subside and allow you to venture further into the music. The frantic pace of this album continues for another track or so before the title track slows things down and establishes a groove, one which reaches an amazing peak at around the three minute mark, ushering in arguably the most interesting three minutes of the entire album. It’s the kind of big shift in the span of the record that makes the album memorable as a whole, the same way Powers that Be came at the end of King of All Kings and presented something different from the rest enough that you sat up and took notice of everything that lead up to it. King of All Kings’ moment came at the end of the record; Infernus’ comes right in the middle, and actually signals a shift for the second half of the album to tap the brakes on the chaos and present a little more variety. The Chosen One returns to the more breakneck pace of the opening tracks, while Zealot, Crusader of War again slows things down, not nearly to the extent that the title track does but more along the lines of what another early 2000s Rutan appearance, Morbid Angel’s Gateways to Annihilation, does, before things pick back up for the final three tracks. The changes are not enough to make anyone laud the band as visionary, but they do offer a change of pace, and for that the album is stronger as a whole.

                Lyrically, Hate Eternal is still on the Morbid Angel/ “Ancient Ones” track. I am a man who does love some Satan in his metal, but it’s never a bad idea to branch out a bit.

                Production wise this album is great, or at least great in the context of my last exposure to the band. Fury & Flames’ muddy production was a real, real problem for me, and I lost interest in the album fairly quickly as a result. Infernus here is about on par with a death metal release from a fairly established band in the year 2015; add in the fact that Rutan himself has some producing credits and as such should know better. I don’t mind an Erik Rutan production job; although, for better or worse, the two that pop immediately to mind are Cannibal Corpse’s Kill and the previously mentioned Hate Eternal mess: Kill I have no problems with.

                Overall Infernus is a good album, with enough to keep me returning to it and, maybe most importantly, having moments where I realize that I want to listen to it again, something that doesn’t happen as often as it used to. I feel kind of bad that I kept referencing other albums or specifically another Hate Eternal album,  but for me that’s far more of a positive in this case than anything else. Infernus, while it keeps bringing up memories of King of All Kings, does not make me want to run back to King of All Kings, but rather makes me want to hit play on Infernus again. Somehow if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.