The world is obviously a very big place. Most of us will only glimpse relatively tiny corners of it in a lifetime’s worth of travels. Similarly, there are vast numbers of far-flung metal bands most of us will never get to see on stage, no matter how addicted we are to their music, and studio records just don’t often come close to capturing the explosiveness of some bands’ live performances.
Houston, Texas-based Krullur is undoubtedly one of those bands a lot of people overseas, or even in the U.S., will never get to see as they destroy venues with their crazed and crushing amalgams of thrash, death metal, punk, and grindcore. But what we’ve got for you today is the next best thing, the premiere stream of a record called Dead Live! that does an astonishingly effective job of bringing listeners right into the head-exploding blast zone.
What Dead Live! makes unmistakably clear is that Krullur is a bringer of destruction, creating violent audio cataclysms that sound like nuclear war in the midst of natural disaster, leaving listeners blown to oblivion by the endless evil of their shit. Even the Intro track is mind-mangling, though much creepier than the ruination which follows.
And there you go, we’ve just managed to work all the original song titles on the record into two sentences, though the recording also includes berserk live versions of two cover songs — Napalm Death‘s “Musclehead” and Lip Cream‘s “Kill Ugly Pop”.
Apart from what the song titles signify, the music itself is authentically maniacal, and as head-twisting as it is raw and reckless. The drumming is a goddamned riot; the bass work sounds like a disemboweling machine run amok; the riffing discharges chaos in brain-scouring keys of savagery; the vocals are flat-out unhinged.
But the band also find plenty of moments to get heads hammering and bodies bouncing with booming percussion and murderous doses of chugging and slashing fretwork, and both the freakish guitar soloing and pulse-pounding bass solos add to the crazed serial-killer ecstasy of these full-throttle rampages.
Tempos turn on a dime, brutishly stomping one moment and convulsing in grindcore frenzies the next. Somehow, despite the utterly mauling and off-the-rails mayhem that becomes the music’s dominant impression, Krullur make all the twists and turns (and there are a multitude of them) with impressive precision.
Well shit, if we don’t call a halt to the words it’ll take you longer to read than it will to listen to this 18-minute cavalcade of catastrophe. So listen… get pumped up… and just imagine how many people get rushed to hospitals from the mosh pits this stuff must stir up in the flesh.
Dead Live! will be released on March 3rd by Horror Pain Gore Death Productions, in CD and digital editions. It’s recommended for fans of The Accused, Cryptic Slaughter, Dead Horse, Deceased, Demolition Hammer, Midnight, Morbid Saint, Repulsion, Sodom, and Toxic Holocaust. And you can (and should) pre-order it now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://hpgd.bandcamp.com/album/dead-live
KRULLER:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064156926367
