Album Review: The Whorehouse Massacre – Altar Of The Goat Skull

Self-releasing all but one of their first five releases, these fly-by-wire monsters from Ohio are a bit of a rare find. With few having heard their suffocating wall-of-death sound before, it’s a delight to finally wrap ears around it. Well, a delight compared to being poked in the eye with a burnt stick; a delight compared to being put in the stocks and having bricks thrown at you; a delight compared to having your ears syringed with hydrochloric acid. You get the idea.

One suspects their live show must be a bit hairy seeing as the three members all play bass. Luckily, Kyle M. is also adept at playing lead guitar and their vocalist, Willy P., also has a knack for bashing ten bells out of a drumkit. They’ve been hoiking out demos and EPs since 2005, and this latest release marks a compilation of some of their later material. Shot through with distortion and overdrive, the music within is undeniably aggressive, oppressively doomy, dense to the point of crushing and yet curiously hypnotic.

“Indignation” is the equivalent of aural mincemeat. Teeth-rattling bottom-end, sludge-hurling chugs and Neanderthal guttural sounds and animal grunts that form themselves into such eloquent wordplay as “Steel toe mother fucking your head into the curb” and “Choke on your last fucking screams”. No surprise then when it all slowly begins to disintegrate into a torrent of feedback. “Buried In The Darkness” digs out a soft and sweet longwave riff, whilst the scrambling “Bowels Of Hell” goes for something with a similarly bludgeoning sound and equally sympathetic lyrics – “Just another example of living human waste”. Oh hell, what a bundle of joy, this is.

There are no pauses between tracks but you’ll catch when they switch as the thing is like a patchwork quilt of jumps, skips and oblique key changes. There is very little variation in tone or deviation from style. “Sewer Dreams” makes a stab at it, with some flitting, tuneless, ethnic instrument buzzing like a rampant fly stuck in your right ear, but even here they refuse to let you out of the gutter. The grooviest thing is the Sloth cover, “Sassy Pants”, which pitches back and forth with a lively drum section and a quick switch-up in chord structures. It’s quickly down into their usual fare of heads-down, dark droning though. If you can make it as far as the fearsome “Temples Of Perdition” you’re doing well, but I swear if you do the band will have broken you. They broke me there – hell, I even cracked an exhausted smile. Something I last did at an Annotations Of An Autopsy show back in late 2008.

Essentially this is 45 minutes of careless, low-fi slops and barrel-scraping, death-obsessed, elephantine doom-mongering watered-down to the simple joys of constructing a song round a riff, spewing hate and ejecting face-melting levels of distortion. Basic, honest music with zero frills. And therein lays the true pleasure of The Whorehouse Massacre. With so many bands these days welding multiple genres together and throwing everything but the kitchen sink at their music, TWM stick a defiant middle finger up and say “suck on this, you fuck”.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2015/06/the-whorehouse-massacre-altar-of-the-goat-skull-transcending-obscurity/

Album Review: Arbiter - Colossus

There must be many who have never heard of Barter In Blood, or Arbiter as they are now known, as the band’s path to universal acclaim has begun in a relatively low-key manner. There’s been a series of gigs (spawning a live album), two EPs and a single over the last couple of years, so it must feel incredible for this Michigan quintet to finally set this, their debut self-recorded album, afloat amongst the oceans of high-caliber deathcore bands out there. On this evidence, jaws may just drop.

This is butchery with a difference. A carving knife approach to deathcore where so many of their peers are using meat cleavers. Colossus is crushingly heavy, and yet insanely delicate in its treatment of each instrument. Clarity is paramount and whilst the buzzsaw guitars, fathom-deep bass and blood-curdling roars gouge out great chunks, the cymbals crash with a “tiss” and the snare pounds with a “dap” or a “dop”. Not a “tith” or a “thunk” anywhere. Considering this is completely DIY (guitarist Jay Field producing, mixing and mastering the whole caboodle) the quality is uber-impressive. There are also the samples and lyrics that lie within to consider, which have been carefully selected to promote the album’s theme of “breaking free of the negativity and corruption” of the modern way of life. A quick flick through their website shows, not only how proud they are of their achievement, but that they have drawn inspiration from the works of no less a figure than Byron (recanting his words for “A Corsair’s Name”). The end result is startlingly sharp of wit, yet strong of purpose – “Swallow the shards of dreams: regurgitate nothing” (“Bringer Of The Black Dawn”); “A sudden burst of clarity, A lost rainbow of frailty” (“Conflux); “We will be beside you as you get up off the floor and we will be beside you as you unleash the vow you swore” (“Death Or Glory”).

Emerging from the hellish industrial soundscape of “Premonitions”, with its conveyor belts, dragging chains and rock-chipping picks, is like taking a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. “Deadfall” quickly clambers up with chugged strikes and speeding wrists to bellow its introduction of “We are Arbiter” right into your face. The impact of lines like “I am silence, hear me roar” leading into the beatdown are telling and the emotion comes through in spades. Colossus isn’t music for the faint of heart. You’ll hear much in the structure that has gone before but it’s the interweaving of different styles of music that most impresses – tribal rhythmic touches, the odd sharp slap of sliced sampling, a footstep into grind and several more into thrash. “Sins Of The Past” gives us a sneak peak of their rock chops with Josh Marr taking over on the kit to pummel out a regular beat and he’s back again with a modish, clean vocal for the technically adept “Conflux” to counter Connor Louiselle’s half-spat shout. Yet there’s always a spot of throat-melting doom vocal lurking behind the corner and for “We Were Bridges” Field slots in a pitch-dropped version of Louiselle’s actual vocals; a sound that the band refer to as his Viking alter-ego, Urzbegoth, a point so deep his singing approaches mere vibration. It’s cheating, really, but it is pretty shocking.

Colossus is what it says on the tin. I’m convinced that this band are utterly dedicated to the album’s values and true to their convictions – when they say “Death Or Glory” they mean it. Stick the kind of verbal onslaught you can believe in behind Satan’s own voice and a steamroller groove, and you have music that will simply flatten all who dare to stand in it’s way. Yes, jaws will drop.

Also online @ The NewReview = http://thenewreview.net/reviews/arbiter-colossus