AN NCS PREMIERE: PLAGUEWIELDER — “SUFFERING FROM SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS”

 

It’s unlikely that you’re unfamiliar with Plaguewielder if you’ve been a frequent visitor at our putrid site, because we’ve paid a lot of attention to them over the course of a career that now includes two albums, including 2018’s excellent Surrender To the Void (reviewed here). They describe themselves as “a three-piece blackened sludge outfit from a decrepit mill town in Ohio”, an extreme metal power trio “embodying the misery of our times and the determination of Ohio’s forgotten working class”.

The band have a multitude of influences that come through in their viscerally powerful music, and they’ve now completed work on a new EP that both pays tribute to some of them and gives their fans a hard strike of vicious new material. Entitled Suffering From Self-Inflected Wounds, it includes covers of G.G. Allen‘s punk anthem “Bite It You Scum,” as well as working-class blues legend Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, plus three original songs. Today we’re presenting one of those original compositions, and it’s the new EP’s raging title track.

 

 

As a band whose name references a Darkthrone album, Plaguewielder inject this new song with full-throttle black metal ferocity, but there’s a lot of brawling punk energy (and rocking rhythms) in the track as well. It’s a storming two-minute torrent of livid swarming riffs, hammering drums, and vibrant bass lines, matched with scorching vocal fury. As the riffing rises and falls, the song has a bleak, neck-wrecking quality but also a head-hooking fieriness in its melody, and the result is an emotional impact that seems to mix feelings of rage and in-your-face defiance. And it’s a damned infectious song as well.

 

 

Plaguewielder’s current formation includes guitarist/vocalist Bryce Seditz, drummer Tim Roberts, and bassist Daniel Kuntz. One more song from this forthcoming EP, the cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, surfaced a couple weeks ago, and if you missed it, we’ve included that stream below, along with the EP’s title track. As we observed soon after it appeared, it consists mainly of Bryce Seditz‘s acoustic guitar and voice, both twisted into gnarly shapes, but it’s still brutal. Part of its heaviness comes from the distortion in the sound, part of it from the grittiness, the ugliness, and the pain in Seditz‘s vocals. It hits hard, even without the usual instrumentation of metal.

Both tracks are now available as name-your-price digital downloads on Bandcamp. For more news about the release of the EP as it emerges, keep an eye on these locations:

BANDCAMP:
https://plaguewielderoh.bandcamp.com/track/suffering-from-self-inflicted-wounds

FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/Plaguewielderoh