[cover artwork by the inimitable Dan Seagrave]
Hello(ween) all, and a very hellish Halloween to you! Be that this is the designated day of all things dead and frightful, shall we explore something squishy, a bit cadaverous? I swear I’m not rehashing Edmund Kemper pick-up lines, but wouldn’t you be chuffed if I was, you sick bastard. No, the topic of the day is Glorious Depravity’s Death Never Sleeps, a chunky stomp through horrors a tad more corporeal than your seasonal ghouls n’ gob’s, but no less spooky. Pull the needle from October Rust (well…at least get to “Wolf Moon”) and plop it onto this festering slab of no-nonsense death metal from the NYC crypts.
A vast majority of the merry cohort here at Last Rites are filthy deathophiles of the lowest order. These meatballs can actually discern the difference between Trichomoniasis and a roiling sea of mechanized, spraying anuses. Professorial types, really! I am not quite as studied in this, the realm of rot n’ roll. I know what I like and I’d deign to think I have a feel for quality song and riffcraft. Therefore, I’ll turn the table and posit something to you – did you enjoy Glorious Depravity’s 2020 outing Ageless Violence? Oh, ya did, didja? Well, partner, either you’ve got a severed rabbit’s foot in your pocket or I smell a soon-to-be happy camper. Death Never Sleeps is a marked improvement on an already accomplished debut.
The immediate impression of this sophomore outing is “dang, these guys sound like they’ve been playing together for a long fucking time”, and they have! In other bands they have, anyway; each one of these chaps has a deadly resume. The truth is Glorious Depravity is fairly recent! A few years of jamming and voila, their first album was recorded and released. Brief lifespan notwithstanding – veterans are gonna veteran, and with their combined powers they conjure a savage chemistry.
Where Ageless Violence had a more rabid, clawing feel to it, Death Never Sleeps rips and tears with deliberate hostility. This is not lightspeed blasting fury nor knuckle-dragging bludgeoning nor diminished arpeggio fluttering – this is a direct injection of classic death metal’s black blood pushed through a clean syringe. Opener “Slaughter the Gerontocrats” sets the stage with menacing glee. A rolling tom and snare salvo brings in the rest of the dudes who proceed to rip your aging guts…out. Glorious Depravity have a knack for cutting up and splicing different riffs together into new and nastier formations and this track is my favorite example. There aren’t too many melodic or rhythmic motifs in this song, and most people might interpret that as derogatory. It is absolutely not. This is not the kind of death metal that requires unending, whiplash variations to maintain interest. This IS the kind of death metal that will use every ounce of meat it has to rearrange your face into new and unanticipated forms.
I can’t tell ya how dialed in this group is. I can try – see right here right now. The core band nails every verse, every transition with pinpoint precision yet it never feels like it’s been quantized and programmed to oblivion. The tones are obviously organic; it’s simply the sound of four professional musicians, playing comfortably together and sinking their teeth into the material. George Paul and Matt Mewton’s riffs are, to paraphrase Gandalf Grayhame, never too much and never too little. They hit exactly as they need to. Special mention must be made of “Necrobotic Enslavement” in the 6-string department, which begins with a “The Wretched Spawn”-esque sliding groove and runs the gamut elsewhere from sinister trills to 5/4 chromatic descents. Still, nothing is over the top! In an age of maximalist instrumental weaponry, this is the Halo: Combat Evolved pistol. Simple, powerful and deadly.
Pictured: the proud future owners of your lunch money
Doug Moore’s vocal performance is the cherry on top. Of all the improvements upon their first record, the vocals are chief among them. The nasty gutturals are back (see the bulk of “Stripmined Flesh Extractor”) with a plethora of additional tricks. At times he sounds downright playful, altering his tone and pitch strategically to give words a hooky clarity. Death metal doesn’t need a charismatic frontman, vocally. After all, the genre’s typical mission does not extend beyond aural decimation. Then you listen to a band like Glorious Depravity who have combined the hammer-strength instrumental chops with the deftness of an especially engaging leader. Peanut butter and chocolate-type union, right there. Lyrically, the themes trend equally toward lurid takedowns of the modern world as they do your expected tales of bloodletting and Woe (did u c that haha). “Carnage at the Margins” skewers white-collar corporate culture while still reading like an incantation from the Necronomicon. I encourage seeking out physical copies of this one if only to get your eyes on the text, and of course also to toss a few rubles to your boys. Shit, snag a vinyl to catch a blown-up glimpse of that sick, sick artwork. Mr. Seagrave is a legend, it is known, but hot damn this one’s a real keeper, ain’t she?
At under 35 minutes, Death Never Sleeps bulldozes in and out without any flowery fanfare or noodly hoo-ha or spacey boop-beeps. In this age of genre atomization where everyone is quick to splice anything BUT what they should be doing into what they’re ACTUALLY doing, it’s refreshing to hear guys lock into the core of what makes death metal effective and blacksmith it into a bludgeon that’ll outlast our impending nuclear winter. Rip it, don’t skip it.
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As a major fan of a lot Doug Moore’s output, including the past history of this here website, I’m more than a little stunned that I did not know about this band. Correcting that right now, especially as I dig the embed.
Gee wiz. That was a difficult read.