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Asphyx - Death...The Brutal Way

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 July 20 2009 at 04:33:45 AM



Exterminate the brutes.

Re-formed Dutch death-bangers Asphyx are not a band I feel particularly sentimental toward. Formed in the late 80s and having made waves after garnering former Pestilence frontman Martin Van Drunen, it’s likely that that his presence has perhaps unfairly overshadowed the efforts of his compatriots. If there is something like a “classic” Asphyx lineup I remain completely unaware. Classic albums, yes, with The Rack remaining as good a place to start as any, yet even musically the band were more inheritors than trailblazers, playing that part supremely with music both brutal and intimidating. A band that frequently bullied their sound into you and are today probably more important than they ever were ten-twenty years ago.

Fears of another quick cash-in return quickly subside amid the blistered charge and battered grooves of opening track “Scorbutics.” For their seventh album, Asphyx put forth a sound worlds apart from their contemporaries, at the same easily putting to shame the (often embarrassing) efforts of all other early-nineties Roadrunner and Century Media alumni. Their greatest weapon being a frightening clarity with which they outline ten unsmiling portraits of disaster, past, present and future - a running theme subverting both the album’s disappointingly weak artwork and apparently knuckle-headed title. Find in Death...The Brutal Way instead the ominous masthead to a catalogue of war and conflict, of hardships and ill-voyages, even cosmic dissolution. Not the valiant death of heroes, but of those on a doomed, forgotten mission; Inglorious, slow and inconsequential. Dark death of the nameless.

Forget Hail of Bullets, forget Bolt Thrower. Asphyx cast aside thoughts of valor and pride for detached observation and the unflinching account. Verses launched as balled fist of agony make no eulogies for fallen heroes inside. Only bodies….brutalized. No, we won’t wax sentimental here over the lines of men shuffling though ice and snow, weakened by hunger, collapsing, empty husks preserved by the cold. Blunt statements tell the tale: “On this route many died.” The closing lines to “Bloodswamp “so clogged with vomit, pulp, dirt and gunk it reads like a draft left behind by Wilfred Owen. A picture so hopeless that life becomes only a futile gesture. Extremities animated by a ground assault of guitar’s alternate bombardment and slow trudging march underlining Van Drunen’s desperate cries, his coarse vox rivaled only by Ross Dolan as king of such caustic and yet easily understood rhetoric . But here as well comparisons fail. Doubtful that anyone but Van Drunen could bring to life the full force of urgency and panic filled within the scurvy sores of endnotes like “No more fruits and vegetables to eeeeat!”

Altogether a hard pill to swallow, but it’s about time a band of this pedigree made Death Metal once again uneasy. Providing only small succor to the faint of heart early on in a plea to “save humanity from pain / in afterlife fantasia / spare the species their suffering / with global euthanasia,” and so I recommend it to you as I would my worst enemy.

[Todd DePalma]

Asphyx
Death…The Brutal Way
2009
Century Media
type: reviews    keywords: death metal, reunion, death, lhp028, bad day, war, strife, gunk, pox, dutch, brutality,   

Related

- Hail of Bullets - ...Of Frost And War

Comments (1)

  • 1 comment
    Nick
    4:12 PM on Jul 20, 2009 // reply »
    Wow, this is the closest thing to an actual album review that I have ever read on here. Well done(not sarcastic, really) I might just have to check this album out
 

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