Conveniently in time for Halloween season, Necrophagia awakens from its three-year slumber.
Back in ye olden days of the 1980s, when death metal was just crawling forth from the womb, Necrophagia was among the first wave. In their earliest incarnation, this Ohio-based outfit spit forth a handful of demos and one full-length before splitting up in 1987. Like many of the b-level classic horror and gore films from which it took inspiration, Necrophagia’s debut Season Of The Dead wouldn’t find vast amounts of success, but instead would become a cult classic of early thrashing death in the years after the band’s initial demise.
After a decade-long hiatus, Necrophagia was resurrected in 1998 by vocalist Killjoy (the band’s only consistent member) and guitarist Anton “Philip Anselmo” Crowley. The subsequent comeback album, Holocausto de la Muerte, added more black metal influences, including guest vocal spots from Mayhem’s Maniac, expanding upon the fetid, oozing, eerie atmosphere that characterized earlier releases. Anselmo departed thereafter to one of his seventeen other bands, and the line-up rotations continued. Amongst those comings and goings, the most significant addition was that of Sigh leader Mirai Kawashima on keyboards, whose presence markedly ratcheted up the creepy horror vibe on later efforts like the ho-hum Divine Art Of Torture and 2005’s much improved Harvest Ritual, Vol. 1.
So here we are, on the eve of the band’s fourth decade of existence, and aside from almost every band member multiple times, not all that much has changed, and especially not from the Harvest Ritual days. Killjoy’s still here; Kawashima returns after sitting out the last record. So it’s back to business as usual, from the very first seconds…
WhiteWorm Cathedral opens with a sample of the Satanic chant from the Mexican horror film Alucarda, dropping right into its groove with the catchy “Reborn Through Black Mass.” Here as always, Killjoy’s vocals are the best part of the band’s attack; his array of screeches and screams and gurgles is impressively twisted. (Or twistedly impressive? You decide.) Most of the riffs are simple, but they’re effective, even if not always memorable. Most importantly, they leave room for Kawashima’s keyboards, which are used sparingly and expertly to create the desired creepy-crawly atmosphere. There’s no technical flair in anything on hand, no real surprises. It’s Necrophagia being Necrophagia, which means there is only gory horror metal on WhiteWorm’s best tracks like “Angel Blake,” the title track, “Rat Witch,” “Coffins,” and the annoyingly punctuated “March Of The Deathcorp(s)e.” (Why is only that S in quotes? To distinguish “deathcorpse” from “deathcorpe”? Whatchootalkin’bout, hmmmmm?)
In the pantheon of post-reformation Necrophagia, WhiteWorm Cathedral is better than Holocausto and Divine Art, and on par with Harvest Ritual. (I missed out on 2011’s Deathtrip 69, so I can’t place it in the spectrum.) Overall,WhiteWorm is uniformly solid – the tracks listed above are definite highlights, though the others do sort of blur together into a mass of respectable, if not quite astounding, horror metal. The production is appropriately fetid; the guitar tones of Scrimm and Abigail Lee Nero are dirty and rotten, thankfully not falling prey to cavern-core or gore-grind cliché. As a unit, the band performs capably, underpinning Killjoy and Kawashima, but ultimately, the show belongs to those two, no matter who’s backing them up this time around.
Necrophagia is the aural equivalent of the B-movies that Killjoy holds so dearly: They take stock elements of gore, Satanism, evil, zombies, demons, and combine them into a thoroughly enjoyable creepfest. Like some monster from below, they emerge when the time is right, when the full moon shines, or just whenever Killjoy feels like it, ready to wreak havoc and steal some souls, and they’ve crawled forth again with one of the best efforts of their lengthy career.
