Unlike in a few past years, this year I’ve had time to complete and post a new installment of this list every weekday since I started rolling it out. What I’ve got ahead of me today created a serious risk I wouldn’t get this 18th Part finished in time. So, in a hurry, I’ll truncate the intro:
OK boys and girls, it’s time to tear off your clothes and go running wild into the streets! Unless you’re over 40, and then it might be best if you kept your clothes on, out of consideration for the neighbors.
SPIRITWORLD (U.S.)
If you’ve never seen SpiritWorld live on stage I strongly encourage you to beg, borrow, or steal whatever you need to buy a ticket and get to a show, even if the closest venue is Siberia. I saw them play Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle last year, and man, what a fucking revelation that was. I’d only heard a few songs off their first album, and their second one (Deathwestern) wasn’t due out until five months later, so I didn’t have a very good idea of to expect. I sure as hell didn’t know how they’d be dressed.
Let’s just say they were crazy good, and the fancy Western wear made the show an even more eye-popping spectacle. I’m sure they played tracks off of Deathwestern, which of course I didn’t recognize, and that album proved to be as great as I expected it would be. It’s an example of an album where I could have blindly picked anything from it for this list. I picked “Committee of Buzzards“.
Gonzo wrote our review of the album, and after exalting Stu Folsom‘s vocals (“sounding like what you’d hear if Jamey Jasta and Dwid Hellion were yelling at each other while gargling battery acid”), he wrote this:
But the real highlight throughout DEATHWESTERN is the searingly intense fretwork from the axe duo of Randy Moore and Matt Schrum. The pair insert their devastating headbang fuel generously on each song, and they do it in ways few of their peers have done this year. The breakdown that punctuates the second half of “Committee of Buzzards,” for example, is downright lethal. Remember that feeling of “I might die in this pit” from earlier? If the 3:05 mark of “Buzzards” hits and you’re not thrashing around in a wild stupor in your living room, you might want to have your pulse checked.
https://spiritworldprophet.bandcamp.com/album/deathwestern
https://www.facebook.com/spiritworldprophet/
WEREWOLVES (Australia)
If you haven’t started wilding in the streets yet, you obviously need something more to set your ass on fire, and this next song is just the thing we’re looking for.
We published not one but two reviews of Werewolves‘ 2022 album From the Cave to the Grave. Gonzo penned these words about it (among others):
It’s an exercise in unfettered ferocity, brutality, and a giant middle finger to anything that stands in its way…. It’s raw, it’s extreme, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t give a single shrimp-fried fuck what you think about it. This is the kind of blistering death metal that I want to play as I drive to Brett Kavanaugh’s house to take a shit on his driveway. It’s simply essential listening for anyone looking for the angriest possible aural outlet. Trust me.
And then we had these words (among many, many others) from DGR:
Werewolves‘ songs are basically like rocking out to the sound of machine-gun fire…. It’s fast, angry, and never claims to be anything more than that…. This is stuff you throw on because it has the inverse effect of calming you down. This is stuff for when the outside world deserves the amount of vitriol issued by the band. This is stuff that is going to be perfect for those of us who work retail and the holiday music playlist begins.
I could have picked other songs from teh album for this list, but I picked “Nuclear Family Holocaust” as much because of the song title and the insanely hilarious lyrics as for the mind-warping, bone smashing effects of the music.
https://werewolvesdeathmetal.bandcamp.com/track/nuclear-family-holocaust
https://www.facebook.com/werewolvesinhell
THE ANTICHRIST IMPERIUM (UK/Australia)
Come on, you didn’t really think I’d get through this list without including that waaay OTT album art did you? It also made some sense to include a song from this band’s 2022 album Vol III: Satan In His Original Glory in today’s collection because a couple of berserkers from Werewolves were in the line-up for it, along with a couple from Akercocke and Voices. And also because the song I chose fits so well with the first two in today’s segment (ass on fire again, with extra weirdness).
DGR wrote a lot of words about the album as a whole. I’ll just crib the ones about the song I picked for this list:
In continuing the chronicles of ‘weird’, we must mention the start/stop dynamic of a song like “Menage A Triumvirate” closer to the end of the album. After settling into a little bit of a recognizably strange groove with just enough bumps to catch you off-guard, The Antichrist Imperium crank out one of their faster movements within the album and slam a prog-metal sweeping guitar lead into the mix for a song that is blindingly ferocious and teeth-bared way in the back of this release…. [It seems] to exist partially to add some levity to the mix, so that it isn’t all space-traveling the entire time and there is enough violence to earn the death metal tag as one of its many subgenre-crashing hybrid descriptors.
Enjoy!
https://apocalypticwitchcraft.bandcamp.com/album/volume-iii-satan-in-his-original-glory
https://www.facebook.com/theantichristimperium/