There was a time, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago, when the combination of death metal and a boss heavy metal pedal would set my heart aflutter. Sadly, that time has passed. In the words of B.B. King, the thrill is gone. It is human nature, I suppose, to run every good idea into the ground, and that is certainly what has been done with the once-beloved Stockholm sound. It is not that I have lost all appreciation for the chainsaw-like tones of the old HM-2, but they no longer cut a path straight to my heart. If you’re going to play the Swedish death metal worship card, you’d best have the riffs to back it up.
Enter Arizona’s Gatercreeper, with its first full-length album, Sonoran Depravation. Gatecreeper brings the riffs, and precious little else. Their promo materials namecheck a bunch of old-school death metal titans – from Dismember to Bolt Thrower to Obituary, and while there are shades of all of those in Sonoran Depravation‘s muscular gooves, the album reminds me of Grave more than any other. Grave was the bulldozer of the early Stockholm scene; the most straightforward and the heaviest. Gatecreeper brings similar heft, with a similar doomy bent and an equal (if not greater) lack of both embellishment and bullshit.
I don’t think we need to pretend that there is any secret as to how this type of death metal works. The riffs are eighty five percent of the battle, and the other fifteen percent involves not doing anything to fuck up those riffs. Gatecreeper accomplishes this quite handily. Drummer Metal Matt is precisely the right type of engine to drive this train. Matt’s playing thuds with the necessary authority to properly punctuate this weighty material. And while his beats are often fairly straightforward, he cuts loose with double bass in all the right spots. Vocalist Charles Mason has a generic but serviceable death growl that neither enhances nor detracts from the proceedings to any large degree. And as for the bass, eh, who gives a shit? It’s in there somewhere, I guess. Kudos to Sean Mears for not sticking out like a sore thumb.
Now the meat of the matter: the tunes. Unsurprisingly, given the aforementioned influences, the songs on Sonoran Depravation are predominantly mid-paced, and groove-heavy. They are concise, with only one of the nine tracks surpassing four minutes. Though Gatecreeper’s brand of brutality is far from frenetic, there is a grim relentlessness to its approach; the songs are never more than a few seconds removed from a chugging riff that hacks, hammers or rips at your ears. What melody there is occurs organically through the riffs, because, aside from a few stray licks and the odd bit of harmonization, there is essentially no lead guitar.
Though, as previously stated, mid-paced grooves dominate the record, there is a significant doom element to Gatecreeper’s sound. Not just via massive crawling riffs, but also in the Candlemass-styled melodic figures that occasionally crop up, such as in the mid-section of “Craving Flesh” and the opening of “Flame Thrower”. On the other side of the coin, Gatecreeper occasionally gets the lead out, most notably in the ferocious, under two-minute “Desperation”.
Gatecreeper might turn a few more heads if they added some solos, a few more nods to melody, and a more dynamic vocal performance. But for the true fan of this style, all you really need is present on Sonoran Depravation in abundance. I think even my cold heart might have fluttered a little.
