another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

some "content" about an album from a Canadian death and thrash band

Besieged returns twelve years later

The engine is flooded with death metal and thrash, and because of that you can smell Violence Beyond All Reason. The new album from Besieged burns from track one with blink-and-you-miss-it atonal solos, spitfire chord changes, barking vocals and guitars, and hyper-driven drums.

“Paragons Of Brutality” opens with drum fills that fall into a groove before slam-dancing from riff to riff. This sound is part of the legacy of the classic Florida-based band, Death. The old way’s piss-stain spread shows darker on “Path to Defy,” where the band tries to piece together pit-bull bites. And drums first lead the attack and then hold back on “Descent into Despotism.”

Powder-flecked riffs spill from pockets and socks, and left turns blur into oncoming traffic.

Besieged started around 2010 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Twelve years somehow passed between the band’s debut, Victims Beyond All Help, and now. The sound is a mix of progenitor Death and Bay-area thrash. The songs sometimes lack flow, and the drums can sound canned as the mix buries the bass and cymbals, but the guitar is a self-cutter and this album is wild.

Unspeakable Axe Records releases Violence Beyond All Reason June 6, 2022.