Our recent interview of Proscrito’s guitarist Ricard is one of the most fiendishly entertaining I’ve read in years. Referring to himself and his two bandmates as “boneheaded traditionalists”, he identified their musical and non-musical influences as a mix of “Cianide, Winter, Autopsy, Necro Schizma, Asphyx, Master, Death Strike, early Bolt Thrower, Slaughter, Corrupted, maybe some Samael’s Worship Him, Bestial Summoning and SadEx/Profanatica’s slow parts,” as well as “miscellaneous stuff like garbage bins and general filth, abandoned factories, violence, processions, whips, cilices, Conan the Barbarian flicks and Robert E. Howard stories, leather, spikes, bullet belts, smoke, Frank Frazetta, old westerns, instincts, war atrocities, roadkill, women who lied to me, Hieronymous Bosch, excess, alienation, concrete, broken glass, Francisco de Goya, plenty of books and bizarre, deranged movies, urine….”
There’s a lot more to enjoy in the interview, including discussions of Spanish cultural influences on Proscrito’s music, the reasons for the band’s decision to write their lyrics in their mother tongue (“Spanish lyrics may keep us away from the politically correct crusades if some day anything goes too pointy for the lobbies that demand safe spaces in metal, haha… not that we’re singing for a brighter future for blond children or anything like that”), the production strategy for their debut album as compared to their previous EP (“Llagas y Estigmas shows a rather metallic approach instead of that sludgish former outcome, partly due to a higher tuning, it keeps a coherent line of agonic granulated screams, reverbed monolithic drums, piercing rhythm guitar headaches, wah soloing pain, and disgusting bass lines that will satiate anyone who truly enjoyed our debut MCD/MLP”), and Ricard’s vision of the perfect death/doom album (“It must place its stress in metal and death, the right old influences… Slow decay, rottenness, the crunchy taste of worms, greenflies, the noise of crepitating flesh at the crematorium, and the stench of formaldehyde are needed, too”).
Well, I should stop with the interview excerpts. The point of today’s post is to furnish some of the actual music itself from Proscrito’s new album in advance of its January 27 release by Memento Mori… but you really should read the interview if you want some hearty smiles and to learn a few things worth knowing, and not only about the band and what drives them. Now let’s turn to the song we’re premiering, “Marcado por la Pezuña“.
The song’s title translates to “Marked by the Hoof” — a cloven one, undoubtedly — and those interview excerpts I quoted already point the way to what you will hear: A ghoulish, lurching cadence marked by ritualistic drums; groaning, dragging chords coated in filth; vomitous growls and macabre howls; and a head-moving, brain-hooking riff that comes into play when the band step up the pace into something punchier and less cadaverous.
Near the end, the song returns to dismal, morbid dreams that transmit sensations of choking dread and barren hopelessness, of degradation and decay. It might make you long for one more dose of that neck-bending riff… but to get that you’ll just have to play the song again (a temptation that in my case has proven to be irresistible).
“Marcado por la Pezuña” is a hellishly good song, and there are more where that came from on the album. As proof, we’re including a stream of “Persistiendo“, a track that was revealed prior to today’s premiere.
Llagas y Estigmas (“Sores and Stigmata”) was recorded with Javi Felez during “three days of morbid delirium” at Moontower Studios (Ataraxy, Graveyard, Oniricous, Teitanblood). As for the album’s cover art, we’ll turn back to Ricard one last time (with thanks to hum and to Comrade Aleks for conducting the interview): “[M]aybe an inverted cross has lost its value of transgression by now, but one can’t deny the strength it can achieve in a monumental form made of stone with a flagellant kneeling and praying in front of it. Also remember: you can always choose to be nailed to the inverted one if you’re undeserving of a regular cross, and that can be linked to some of the lyrics and themes of self-deprecation, guilt and bodily/spiritual corruption that in some way or another we (and penitents, in fact) focus on”.
PRE-ORDER:
http://www.memento-mori.es
https://proscritoyolvidado.bandcamp.com
PROSCRITO:
http://proscrito.6te.net
https://www.facebook.com/proscritoyolvidado