Since the rise of Deathcore in the ‘00s, I’ve been following the various strains of it with mild interest, seeing it develop towards melodic, djenty or brutal tendencies. Firmly in this latter camp, US quintet Labyrinthe have unleashed The Depths of Hell this year, their début for Tribunal.

Taking notes from acts such as Suicide Silence and Carnifex, the band go one stage further and incorporate some of modern Brutal Death Metal’s characteristics, taking Ingested’s Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering as a navigation point. As you can imagine, this record is just a little bit heavy.

Boys and girls, a quicky!

Still young but already experienced Polish formation NEYRA, combining Brutal Death Metal and Thrash with additional aggression, released their latest video for the song Mors Nigra. In the meantime they are looking for a label to release their first LP, titled Madness in Progress and following up on their mini-album Self-made Torment.

This is quite an oldie, and as the album related to this promo, Conceived Genetically Perverse, has already been released, this will also be a shortie. Avgrunn (Norwegian for abyss), are a Spanish Brutal Death-outfit who do not beat around the bush. They shamelessly smack their genetically perverted foetuses in your face with this three-track promo.

Promo 2012 contains a wild assault of stereotypical Brutal Death Metal, yet it is quite a pleasant listen. The music doesn’t tear out your eardrums, but instead strikes them in a firm manner.
The drums are tight and rage along, while drummer Leo Gutiérrez generally resorts to blast beats, which becomes tiring at certain parts of the demo. A large point of critique when it comes to drums though, is the fact that these tight blasts, aren’t always in time with the rest of the music, which is a shame.

[Edit: Our newest writer Robert is back with more. Robert turns out to be a massive fan of Nile and sets himself to the task of reviewing the band’s 2002 album In Their Darkened Shrines. It is the start of a new series: Albums You Should Own, in which he will review the classics of (Extreme) Metal.]

One of the most listenable, best-produced yet brutally technical and frantic albums in Death Metal, Nile’s In Their Darkened Shrines, remains fresh and accessible today despite being a decade old this year. The album built on the solid foundations Nile had crafted through previous releases Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka and Black Seeds of Vengeance and cemented their place at the top of the Death Metal game, combining breakneck riffing, blastbeats and eerie instrumental passages in equal measure – all tied together by Nile’s signature Egyptian themes and lyrics.

The end of humanity. On the cover is an old hitman holding a silenced pistol. God who’s about to put a bullet in Humanity?

The album is Divultion’s first. The Ukrainian band out of Simferopol has been a musical unit since June 2005, but only saw its efforts come to full fruition with the early 2011 release of The End of Humanity. Titles like Worms Under Skin, Eat My Guts and Rotting give a strong suggestion of Brutal Death Metal and reality proves this right at least partly. Divultion does focus on delivering a product that is as loud and harsh as it could possibly be. On the contrary, there is a strong technical focus in the eight songs – there’s also an outro with Boondock Saints outtakes – that The End of Humanity is rich.

Just got a message about this band called Shturm. I cannot begin to compare this to anything I’ve ever heard, but it’s good. Boy is it GOOD!

Shturm is a group of four guys from Krasnodar, Russia, a city located in the South-Western corner of the country. Taking a quick look through the band’s profile page on Encyclopaedia Metallum, my guess is the band started out in 2003, doing a brutal sort of Black Metal. Their first record came out in 2004 and carries the title unambiguous title Fresh Christian Meat.

Stepping forward in time to the current year, the band released its third album, called Karmaruna. I don’t proclaim to have heard anything more of that than the one song for which they released a video, but that does seem to suggest the band have drastically developed their style since 2004. I’ve lined up the video past the jump.

The good thing about EPs is that they’re quick to review. And so, when normal, paying work’s riding you whippingly, it’s easier to just review another EP than to dive into a full-fledged studio album that takes days to get through to and figure out completely. Some may have noticed: work has been riding my poor scrawny ass lately and as a result I haven’t been overly active writing here – it’s only thanks to the other DMB writers that you continued to get your daily fix – so now that I’ve got a bit of time, what better thing to do than chuck in another EP review?

The disadvantage of EPs is of course the same trait that is their virtue: they’re short. So when you stumble upon this really neat piece of work, cravings may be left unsatisfied. With Face of Ruin it’s a bit like that. The Milwaukee based proggy Death outfit released the EP in mid-2011 after they stuck three songs on it, supplying a quarter of an hour worth of shape-shifting emotions and mental states.

As per the usual for me lately I’m short on time. Running a small electrical contracting business and having my one employee out for family troubles means I get to do every-fuckin-thing. It sucks. What doesn’t suck is a discovery I made a few days ago in the form of one of many bands known as Abyssal. This one hails from the UK and came into existence in 2010 before unleashing their debut, Denouement, on the second day of this year.

The sound on this beast is what you may expect from a band called Abyssal as it’s straight out of the abyss. Imagine if you mixed the most blistering elements of Black Metal with the finer points of Brutal Death Metal and topped it off with some dissonance reminiscent of Ulcerate. This is an album that will kick the shit out of you, seriously. And it won’t cost you a cent, because these generous bastards have released it as a straight-up free download via Bandcamp.

It’s weird, considering the name of this blog, but for some reason I’m not doing too many Death Metal reviews. I think I this is my second or third one, and to be precise, it’s my first Brutal Death Metal release. Exciting.

About half a month ago the boys themselves approach us via Facebook, and their description of “Death Grind / Black Metal / Melodic Brutality” appealed to me, so I took the job. At first though, I was hesitant as in my experience, Brutal Death Metal bands got fairly low grades. That is, in comparison to bands from other genres like Black Metal and Hardcore. However, when I first turned on this 17-minute long piece, I was quite surprised to hear something which grabbed me. Usually, I feel that in Brutal Death Metal, the heaviness is drowning out in its own blood, and together with this, my interest for the music. Corpse Filled Caskets does not contain the loudest riffing, but there is some really interesting drumming and riffing going on which, together with the witty dialogues in between make for an enjoyable quarter of an hour.

Where my prejudice about Norwegian Metal makes me expect all Metal from Norway is Black Metal, I’ve got a similar – and equally fucked-up – rule of thumb about Sweden. It’s either Old-school Death Metal type of stuff or Melodeath that they produce there. Absolute rubbish of course and the examples are numerous. Still, it’s a bit of a default thing to expect I guess.

Today we add another entry to our list of examples that counter that coarse generalization: Humanity’s Last Breath. They’re a five-piece from the city of Helsingborg, where I know also Soilwork is from. A typical line-up of two guitars, a bass, some bongos and a voice, these guys produce something undeniably brutal and aggressive, often a shit storm of blasts and chugs, but also often melodic and harmonious. That is what I pulled from the band’s latest release, which was sent out into the world in early 2011 as their second EP since forming in 2009.