All Shall Perish - Hate.Malice.Revenge
Nuclear Blast - NB 1401-2 - 2005
By Philip Whitehouse
This is the kind of record I've been waiting a long time to hear. Four years ago, when I started writing for this website, I spent a lot of time espousing the quality of prime, unfettered brutality in death metal records. I felt that the over-reliance on Gothenburg melody or dizzying technicality had reduced the furious catharsis essential to effective death metal. Then metalcore and screamo came along, and done well, it showed that melody and brutality didn't have to be mutually exclusive terms. Then came deathcore, which usually showed young death metal bands completely harpooning their momentum with emo-humping clean singing sections, or hardcore bands trying to play more technical riffs but falling short.
Here, at last, is a true melding between the brutality, heaviness and crunch of death metal and the melodic-but-furious dynamics of the best, heaviest metalcore. All Shall Perish meld head-crushing groove and piledriving beatdowns to suffocatingly heavy death metal riffage and vocals with an efficiency and destructive force that suggests a jam session between Suffocation and Atreyu, minus any clean vocals or acoustic sing-a-longs. This is full-on, balls out distorted carnage all the way, and it's absolutely fantastic.
The production helps immeasurably, of course - the guitar tones have all of the crunch and snarl you'd expect, but also a clarity that lets the melodies - such as the 'Laid To Rest''s almost black-metal tremolo picking - shine through the bottom end crunch. The snares snap as though being hit with aluminium baseball bats, and the cymbals crash and clatter like falling sheets of metal. It's astonishingly heavy stuff, and I love it. Hate.Malice.Revenge has been on my CD player constantly for about the last month, and shows no signs of letting go it's hold on me.
9/10
All Shall Perish Official Website
Nuclear Blast Records
Nuclear Blast - NB 1401-2 - 2005
By Philip Whitehouse
This is the kind of record I've been waiting a long time to hear. Four years ago, when I started writing for this website, I spent a lot of time espousing the quality of prime, unfettered brutality in death metal records. I felt that the over-reliance on Gothenburg melody or dizzying technicality had reduced the furious catharsis essential to effective death metal. Then metalcore and screamo came along, and done well, it showed that melody and brutality didn't have to be mutually exclusive terms. Then came deathcore, which usually showed young death metal bands completely harpooning their momentum with emo-humping clean singing sections, or hardcore bands trying to play more technical riffs but falling short.
Here, at last, is a true melding between the brutality, heaviness and crunch of death metal and the melodic-but-furious dynamics of the best, heaviest metalcore. All Shall Perish meld head-crushing groove and piledriving beatdowns to suffocatingly heavy death metal riffage and vocals with an efficiency and destructive force that suggests a jam session between Suffocation and Atreyu, minus any clean vocals or acoustic sing-a-longs. This is full-on, balls out distorted carnage all the way, and it's absolutely fantastic.
The production helps immeasurably, of course - the guitar tones have all of the crunch and snarl you'd expect, but also a clarity that lets the melodies - such as the 'Laid To Rest''s almost black-metal tremolo picking - shine through the bottom end crunch. The snares snap as though being hit with aluminium baseball bats, and the cymbals crash and clatter like falling sheets of metal. It's astonishingly heavy stuff, and I love it. Hate.Malice.Revenge has been on my CD player constantly for about the last month, and shows no signs of letting go it's hold on me.
9/10
All Shall Perish Official Website
Nuclear Blast Records
