Band: Stillborn (Poland) Album: Los Asesinos del Sur (2011) Genre: Death Metal No, this is not a Spanish band. It’s a Polish band, from a city called Mielec. Yet all of their four studio albums, released between 2004 and last month carry Spanish titles. Their latest is called Los Asesinos del Sur, which according to an online translation means ‘The Murderers of the South’.

Stillborn is an Anti-Christian, Satanic Blackened Death Metal outfit and with that in mind the titles of their earlier works, Satanas el Grande (Satan the Great), Manifiesto de Blasfemia (Manifest of Blasphemy) and Esta Rebelión es Eterna (This Rebellion is Eternal), make sense. The Murderers of the South eludes me though, no clue what it’s supposed to mean in the context of worshipping Beelzebub. Not that I care much, as this shit sounds pretty decent and that’s all I give a hairy cock about.

Stillborn is a bit of an odd combination. They’ve got that look of a bunch of Motörhead fans and in some ways their music also has that ‘…’n’ Roll type of feel’. Moreover, and this is really strongly so, vocalist Ataman Tolovy generally sounds like a spiced-up version of Lemmy. It’s that he does other styles, e.g. brutal growls and screeching screams, too, or I would have thought Lemmy joined Stillborn. But contrary to this more or less classic side, they’ve got a side that’s purely evil, purely ruthless and purely noisy.

In most songs, the effect is extremely brutal and definitely what you’d deem suitable to carry Satan’s message. It’s like a big freak of a monster, slowly rolling down the street, soaking up everything and everyone in its path and immediately converting all to agonized slaves of the devil. That may sound all Norwegian Black Metal to you, but these Poles are extremely different from that, the only similarity being who they pay homage to. Musically they are as different as shit and piss.

The songs on Los Asesinos del Sur are one after the other loud fuckin’ combinations of Death ‘n’ Roll, Death Thrash and old-school Death, with the keyword being ‘Death’. This stuff is crude and unpolished and although the riffs and rhythms contain a certain amount of groove, it’s hardly heard because of this rawness. On top of that they do some ”solos” too, which are seemingly random piles of high-pitched notes squirming like a pile of worms. And short too, generally living only seconds before they are smashed by more brutal riffage.

In addition to my piss poor description of the band’s sound, here’s a song to help you get your head around this. Not having an obvious favorite from this record, I simply went for the record’s title track as musical accompaniment. It’s the longest song on the record and I believe it gives quite an accurate sample of what the whole album is like.

I find it quite different to give a verdict on this one. There are moments that I’ve been solidly headbanging to the music, but at other times I’m slightly bored by the never-ending blast of noise, lacking variation to keep things interesting. I guess it means this just isn’t pure listening music, but music to be used as fuel on a fire of activity. Also in that way it’s similar to Motörhead. So, try this while you iron your shirts, clean the toilet or do the fuckin’ dishes or something, although you might end up with burnt cloth, a broken bowl and a floor full of shards.

My Grade: 7.0/10
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Tags: anti-Christian, dark, death, Polish, review

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.