DIOCLETIAN / WEREGOAT: “DISCIPLES OF WAR”

At least some of you who are on Facebook and who have liked the NCS Facebook page saw this album art when I posted it late yesterday. Based on how many people saw that FB post, it seems like the artwork has generated a lot of interest. So I thought I ought to explain what it is in more detail.

It’s the cover of a forthcoming split by Diocletian from New Zealand and Weregoat from Portland, Oregon. The title of the split is Disciples of War. It will be released on 12″ vinyl by Parasitic Records and on CD by Dark Descent. I don’t have a release date yet and pre-orders haven’t started. Once I get more info, I’ll add an update.

The complex, hand-drawn album art is, as you can see, amazing, and amazingly vile. It was created by Daniel “Desecrator” Corcuera, a 27 year-old artist who lives in Chile. Based on a brief bio I found on a site that was describing an exhibition of his work in Portland (here), it appears he is entirely self-taught and spends his time as a tattoo artist, illustrator, and vocalist/bassist for a band called Slaughtbbath.

Desecrator has created album art and logos for bands such as Bestial Mockery, Sathanas, Vomitor, Suicidal Winds, Dead Congregation, Hooded Menace, Thornspawn, Satanic Warmaster, and more. A listing of many bands for whom he has created artwork can be found here. And via this link, you can find an interview with him and more of his artwork.

As for the music on the split, I expect it will be utterly savage. We’ve written about Diocletian multiple times, most recently here. Their most recent releases are a May 2012 7″ EP entitled European Annihilation, produced for their European tour earlier this year, and a June 2012 hour-long compilation of the songs from their first four recordings between 2005 and 2008 by the name of Annihilation Rituals. The word “annihilation” appears in these titles for a reason.

To explain what I mean, here’s a track from the new EP. We’ve featured it before, but what the hell.

“Antichrist Hammerfist”

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/38876179″ iframe=”true” /]

Despite the fact that Weregoat make their home only a few hours south of where I live, I wasn’t familiar with their music until I found out about this split. Their debut recording is an album released earlier this year by Dark Descent (and available for order here) with the fetching title of Unholy Exaltation of Fullmoon Perversity. It consists of eight songs with a total run time of just under 25 minutes.

I don’t have this album, and the only songs I’ve heard from it so far are the two I’m about to stream or you — “The Hideous Stench of Occult Slaughter” and “Invoke the Black Oblivion” — although I’m downloading it from Amazon mp3 as I write this.

In a nutshell, the music is an obscenely filthy offering of occult black/death destruction. The first song is fast, the second one slow, but both ooze evil from every grimy pore. The production is scraped so raw that jagged bone pokes through the bleeding meat. The riffing is fat, fuzzed out, and dissonant, and the massive reverberating vocals are just flat-out horrifying.

I’m looking forward to Weregoat’s offerings on Disciples of War as much as I am Diocletian’s.