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Category: death metal

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The California Bay Area has long been a home to some of the most technical death metal around. The slow but inevitable dissolution of Necrophagist, the continuing studio hiatus of Odious Mortem, and the folding of Spawn Of Possession and more recently Brain Drill has acted as a catalyst for the formation of several domestic and international supergroups. Continuum from Santa Cruz was formed in 2009 by sometime Decrepit Birth guitarist Chase Fraser and is home to former members from Brain Drill, Inanimate Existence, and post-Jacoby Kingston Deeds Of Flesh. After several years of incubation Continuum debuted in 2015 with “The Hypothesis”. “Designed Obsolescence” harkens back to the halcyon days of pre-2005 when Unique Leader was a boutique label specialized in death metal exclusively. With Inherit Disease no longer under contract, Continuum is hellbent on replacing them as the label’s flagship act.

Fraser has surrounded himself with quite the talent. Riley McShane is also in Allegaeon and fronted Inanimate Existence for an album, Ivan Munguia has played with Odious Mortem, Nick Willbrand has recorded an album with Flesh Consumed, and Ron Casey is probably the most in-demand drummer of the last decade and a half. He, like Munguia, was involved with Brain Drill and appeared on their “Quantum Catastrophe”. With an assembly of this caliber “Designed Obsolescence” could’ve easily succumbed to masturbatory excess and egocentric indulgence, yet somehow it never does. Fraser is able to rein in everybody’s showboating tendencies and everything is always in service of the song. The only somewhat puzzling choice is placing Ivan Munguia on rhythm - instead of bass guitar. Willbrand is certainly up for the task but he’s no Jeroen Paul Thesseling, Linus Klausenitzer, Steve DiGiorgio, Michael Poggione, Erlend Caspersen, Giulia Pallozzi, or Éric Langlois. Which doesn’t make Continuum any less than a gathering of local mega talent and something that sounds right at home next to Omnihility, Equipoise, and latter-day Decrepit Birth as well as Canadian acts Augury, Beyond Creation, and First Fragment. For better or worse, Continuum is very much a product of its time.

Continuum takes more than a page or two from now-defunct Swedish act Spawn Of Possession and the shadow of “Cabinet” and “Noctambulant” looms large over “Designed Obsolescence”. Fraser and his men give it enough of a Californian flavor and his soloing is more than a little reminiscent of somebody like Jonas Bryssling. McShane for the most part sounds like Obie Flett from Inherit Disease but tends to alternate more between highs and lows. The swelling orchestral flourish in ‘Designed Obsolescence’ is a nice little touch that immensely enhances the atmosphere. The concept isn’t whole that novel as Soreption did it earlier on “Engineering the Void” in 2014 and bands as Fleshgod Apocalypse and Scrambled Defuncts have made it their entire raison d'être. ‘All Manner Of Decay’ is custodian to probably the best solo of the record. The bass guitar is felt more than heard but is allowed slightly more space in ‘Autonomic’. ‘Repeating Actions’ concludes with the same riff that opens ‘Theorem’ thus creating a semblance of inter-track continuity. The stars of Continuum are definitely Chase Fraser and drummer Ron Casey. The more progressive setup gives Casey is far more freedom to flex his muscles, whereas the narrow confines of Brain Drill restricted what he could do behind the kit. The Pär Olofsson artwork really drives home how apt the Spawn Of Possession comparisons are. At this point you’d imagine the scene having on moved on from Olofsson. Apparently not. For a band as forward-thinking as Continuum it’s surprising that they haven’t discovered Guang Yang, Aditia Wardhana, César Eidrian, Federico Musetti, Dusan Markovic, Monte Cook, or Johnson Ting yet.

It’s not so much a question about ability, either individually or collective, but whether Continuum will be able to differentiate itself enough from competition, foreign and domestic. While there are some mild New Age textures and sparse orchestral enhancements it remains to be seen how and if Continuum will be able to differentiate itself from similar acts as Inanimate Existence, and post-“Procreating An Apocalypse” Inherit Disease. Inanimate Existence is aesthetically different enough through its New Age spirituality imagery and Inherit Disease were among the earlier to push a dystopian futurist and technology-based lyrical concept. Not that that was in any way novel in and of itself. There was after all a little band called Fear Factory who did it earlier than anyone else. The concept of “designed obsolescence” has been commonplace in industrial design and economics for several decades and concerns the intentional planning of a product to become obsolete within a set timeframe as to generate long-term sales volume by repeat purchases of said product. The lyrics about the omnipresence of technology, artificial intelligence, the singularity, and the loss of identity in the digital matrix are interesting and certainly eloquent enough. There’s certainly something slightly ironic about an album title like this when Continuum is one among many such ventures and one bound to tie itself to a certain time-period.

Unique Leader remains one of the most reliable houses of quality death metal, although they arguably lost some of their luster when they started signing deathcore en masse. Continuum is as good as anything from the Unique Leader stable and that they sound like one or two bands that used to be on the label is probably not just a happy coincidence. As a product of the death metal arms race “Designed Obsolescence” sounds like a throwback to the bygone days of 2004-2005 when technical death metal was really taking flight as a genre after the release of “Epitaph” from Necrophagist. In fact Necrophagist would come to define the next decade even if they never came around to releasing that eagerly anticipated third album. Perhaps it is that drives bands like Continuum, the urge to fill that void left by Germany’s last important death metal band. It’s not a bad spot to be in, anyway. With the promotion department of Unique Leader behind them the best is yet to come for Continuum. Here’s hoping they further expand on what they’re pushing here. There’s potential aplenty, for sure.

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Few bands can lay claim to not have a single weak record in their discography. Arlington, Virginia death/thrash/heavy metal survivalists Deceased have been underground luminaries all the way back to their demo days, although the world at large would only come to know them with their 1991 debut “Luck Of the Corpse” on Relapse Records. It’s a nothing short of a miracle that King Fowley and his men have been able to release eight albums. Deceased, after all, is not your everyday death metal band. Their career, now in its third decade, has been cursed by an ungodly amount of bad luck and personal tragedy of about every sort. No wonder then that the release of a new Deceased album is only a sporadic, and nigh-on universally acclaimed, event whenever life allows it to happen. “Ghostly White” is the Virginians first new record since 2011’s superb “Surreal Overdose” and was overshadowed by the accidental passing of longtime drummer Dave Castillo while vacationing with his family in his native El Salvador. Castillo also figured into October 31 and had been with Deceased since 2004. “Ghostly White” seems like an appropriate tribute to a fallen colleague as well for a band still haunted by spectres of the past.

Along with Cannibal Corpse, Death, Impetigo, Mortician, Necrophagia, and Repulsion, Deceased were among the pioneering acts to combine the formative death metal sound with horror cinema. On “Luck Of the Corpse” Fowley expressed his love for camp horror, but things took a turn for the mysterious on “The Blueprints For Madness”. “Fearless Undead Machines” was a conceptual effort based upon the original trilogy of Dead movies from late Pennsylvania filmmaker George A. Romero (with an added dose of science-fiction). From “Supernatural Addiction” Fowley explored horror and science-fiction literature from Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, or Oscar Brand. Deceased continued with that literary approach on “As the Weird Travel On” and “Surreal Overdose”. Ghosts have always been part and parcel with Deceased but “Ghostly White” is the first instance wherein they form the basis for an entire record. Two decades removed from “Fearless Undead Machines” is the culmination of an evolution the Virginians commenced with their legendary 1997 offering. Not only that, in light of Castillo’s all-too-soon passing the title takes on a whole new meaning. “Ghostly White” is a more than loving tribute to their fallen bandmate, drummer, and friend.

Not that Deceased hasn’t been busy ever since aligning themselves with underground specialist label Hells Headbangers for the LP version of “Surreal Overdose”. In 2015 King and his men released two compilations. First there was "Cadaver Traditions", a double-disc effort that combined the band’s out-of-print classic metal cover album “Zombie Hymns” from 2002, as well as 2004’s “Rotten to the Core” that saw Deceased covering their favorite hardcore/punk tunes with a whopping 17 tracks of previously unreleased material as a bonus. Second, the band’s classic “Birth by Radiation” and “Nuclear Exorcist” demos, from 1988 and 1989, respectively were re-issued in the form of the "Demos from the Grave" compilation. In these times of oversaturation and a near-inpenetrable amount of product, a band like Deceased is a rarity. Here’s a band that has lived by the old adage of “quality over quantity”. Over a thirty year career they’ve amassed a respectable discography, but it can hardly be called excessive. Every album has that hard to pinpoint timeless quality. It certainly helps that each is bereft of any modern influence, irrespective of when and by whom it was released. The strength lies in Deceased’s immense songwriting skill that draws from several decades worth of metal history, knowledge, and years of collective experience. Like the best bands in the genre Deceased has their own sound, one that few have dared imitate.

Fowley has always been exceptionally gifted as a lyricist and at least since “As the Weird Travel On” he has taken great pains to diversify and branch out thematically. Over the years his ability to weave a compelling narrative has only increased and “Ghostly White” is everything that “Fearless Undead Machines” was while casting a wider net and spanning a number of ethereal – and material subjects. Now moreso than ever is that manifest on “Ghostly White” as it covers the expected amount of classic horror movies and literature, but also some surprisingly real subjects. The record opens with ‘Mrs. Allardyce’, a song dedicated to the unseen antagonist from Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings (1976) and the original Robert Marasco novel upon which it was based. It then storms into the most ambitious Deceased epic in recent memory with the absolutely gargantuan 13-minute colossus ‘Germ of Distorted Lore’. ‘Germ of Distorted Lore’ is about many things, but primarily about campfire tales and their function, or how mankind fabricates horror stories in folklore to deal with the fear of the unknown or the not-yet explained. It’s easily Deceased’s own ‘Rhyme Of the Ancient Mariner’. Over the years Deceased has had several brushes with illness and death, and ‘A Palpitation’s Warning’ is just about that. Related to that ‘Endless Well’ criticizes the boundless mendacity and greed of the pharmaceutical industry, their complicity in substance abuse and addiction, and the surrounding culture of (self) medication that gives rise to said dependencies in the first place. 'The Shivers' is about David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) and ‘Thoughts From a Leaking Brain’ was inspired by the gothic horror literature of Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Pale Surroundings’ (an excellent contender for possible album title in and of itself) is about John Hancock’s Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), one of the revered American gothic horrors set in contemporary times.

While there’s still some merit to labeling Deceased as a death metal band they have, most certainly in the last decade and a half or so, proven again and again that they are, and have been, transcending the boundaries of the genre from whence for many years now. Just like now defunct Arlington, Texas epic doom metal combo Solitude Aeturnus there has always been (or at least since 1995’s “The Blueprints For Madness”, for those who keep track of such things) a traditional metal component that has only become more prominent and pronounced as the years wore on. Since that time – and as records as “Supernatural Addiction”, “As the Weird Travel On” and “Surreal Overdose” have aptly demonstrated – Deceased is a thrash/heavy metal act first and everything else (especially death metal) a far and distant second. Before anything else “Ghostly White” is another jewel in Deceased’s already studded crown and all the evidence that good things come to those who wait. Many metal bands often like to talk about integrity but Deceased have been quietly building up a catalog of stellar records that many envy and even fewer can match. Always a niche band, and forever outside of popular taste, “Ghostly White” evinces that age hasn’t dulled Deceased. Instead it has only served to strengthen their resolve. Hail King and his men! May the Night of the Deceased be everlasting.