Monstrosity – Screams From Beneath The Surface Review

[Cover art by Timbul ‘Bvllmetalart’ Cahyono]

Here’s the logline on Screams from Beneath the Surface, the seventh full-length album from Florida mainstays Monstrosity: it’s a calorically dense slab of death metal that doesn’t even attempt to compete on the level of ferocity with today’s brutal-tech boundary pushers, but it carves out a comfortable niche for itself with sharp riffs and professional songcraft.

Though so much has changed for Monstrosity since the days of their rightly hailed debut, Imperial Doom, and its sneakily superior follow-up, Millennium, this project still resides in the deregulated borderland between death and thrash. While those first two largely comprised riff-n’-blast bombardments rounded into form by sheer force of will, Screams is a songs-first affair.

Take album intro “Banished to the Skies,” a proper slow-burning mood setter that strikes a series of traditional heavy metal poses (clean-channel arpeggios, melodic leads and galloping triplets) to gradually ratchet the tension before paying it off with a bona fide betcha can’t play THIS-er of a solo. Paired with an Audiohammer/Morrisound engineering job that is suitably modern but not noticeably overcooked or quantized to my ear, and you’ve got a final product that sounds a lot like a modern Kreator record, but without the fist-pumping overtures to those European mega-fests. Does that sound pretty good to you? Hope so, because Screams offers ten tracks of it.

“Colossal Rage,” the lead single, is of a more distinctly death metal mien, with a particularly nasty riff that chases its tail up and down the fret-board at around 1:14. Then we’re right back to death-thrash land at 2:10 with a barrage of pummeling gallops into minor-third dyads that is exquisitely simple and tuneful in equal measure.

Screams from Beneath the Surface by Monstrosity

Here I’ll note that while drummer Lee Harrison is Monstrosity’s sole consistent member since its inception and has never once employed the same lineup on consecutive albums, he does deserve credit for letting his guitar co-conspirators bring their best to the pot-luck, however brief their engagements may be. Here, as it was on 2018’s The Passage of Existence, it’s Chaos Inception’s Matt Barnes bringing his A-game to his B-band. On “The Spiral” and “Fortunes Engraved in Blood,” Barnes employs the occasionally misplaced art of writing interesting riffs for himself to solo over, creating a more expansive playground to dance through moods and modes. 

Of course, there are a few catches. Just today, I was chatting with a pal who explained he was glad to be exploring more technical, brutal and generally psychotically extreme metal as a means of reliving the pure exhilaration he felt when first diving deep into this beloved obsession of ours. At its best moments, Screams won’t appeal to the tired ears of such novelty seekers. And even those who still derive a simpler kind of satisfaction from taking the measure of a well crafted composition may find they’ve had their fill somewhere around Scream’s final act, especially as it settles into a comfortable-veering-on-complacent cadence.

But, well, let me just run this by you.

I recently conducted a poll of my fellow Last Writers, which produced a not totally surprising result:

I chose these two because I generally regard Vader as a band that’s achieved legendary status in the field of death metal through metronomic consistency. And Monstrosity? To be completely honest, it sometimes feels like we don’t regard them as much of anything at all. 

I don’t view the results of this poll as some sort of world historical tragedy or feel particularly inclined to shake my colleagues by the shoulders to disabuse them of an inclination I shared myself before diving deep into some previously uncharted corners of Monstrosity’s catalog. But, you know what? This is a good fuckin’ band. And Screams is at least competitive with the kind of albums self-respecting death metal vets put to market 30+ years into their career. Since faint praise never did anyone any favors, I feel duty-bound to repeat that this album gets a little over-long and dun colored as it proceeds, and I think a band of this caliber is capable of better. But in the final analysis, there are a few tracks on here that will go on my all-time best o’ Monstrosity playlist, which’ll get spun on chest/back days in the gym. I’ll look forward to listening to the whole thing when I binge the band’s catalog, and when I rank all seven this is going closer to the top than the bottom. It is, if not in sound, at least in spirit, a lot like a contemporary Vader album. And for the record, those two votes that marked it as close? Pretty sure they’re the only fellers who’d had a chance to hear Screams from Beneath the Surface.