I have not seen The Poughkeepsie Tapes, the 2007 American pseudo-documentary horror film about Edward Carver, aka the Water Street Butcher. After doing some reading about it (e.g., here), I’m confident I never will, because I don’t have a strong stomach and would like to continue sleeping well at night.
I would guess, however, that the Spanish death metal band Krypticy have seen the movie, and probably more than once, given that the song from their new album which we’re premiering today is named “The Water Street Butcher“.
What have they done with this ghastly inspiration? And what kind of black hole is that tiny figure on the album’s striking cover being inexorably pulled into?
Judging from this song, as well as its inspiration, it’s a black hole of whirling madness and jubilant violence.
Hard-charging and horrifying death metal is indeed the name of the game, but “The Water Street Butcher” proves to be remarkably elaborate and terrifically head-spinning as well. The first hint of that comes in the first seconds, during which a vividly darting bass leads the way in. And bassist Thomas Schenk‘s demented permutations remain a fixture of the song throughout.
But Schenk is not the only demented experimentalist at play in this mind-boggling cavalcade. Guitarists Alex Guerrero and Sergio Álvarez move at high speed but in a multitude of unpredictable and exhilarating directions — sizzling and swarming, pulsating and screeching, gleefully darting away at strange angles, ejecting whining bursts that sound like the agonies of torture, lurching like a brute and skittering in mad frenzies. Somehow, it all holds together as they move from one bizarre motif to another and back again.
Not to be outdone, drummer Pancho Vázquez also rapidly shifts from one pattern to another (some of them slightly off-kilter), while keeping the adrenaline levels high with bursts of percussive machine-gun fire with variable rates of discharge.
And to top things off, Guerrero‘s barking, belly-deep gutturals are as disgusting and lethal as the tale the song is apparently based on. Eventually, he’s joined by Thomas Schenk‘s crazed screams to create harmonies of the murderous and the macabre.
With this one song, Krypticy prove that they are some kind of death metal mad scientists — exuberantly twisted in their conceptions, technically jaw-dropping in their execution, but also ravenously ferocious — and with all that they still manage to make the music fiendishly addictive. Take some deep breaths and see for yourselves:
Lest you think this song is an outlier on the new album (it definitely is not), we’re also providing a stream of the record’s first single, “Hypatia’s Heresy“. You’d best take some deep breaths for this one too (it includes lots of fantastically supernatural guitar solos and ghoulish musical lurching, among many other things).
The name of Krypticy‘s new album is The Non-Return. That macabre eye-catching cover art was made by Cardaver Art. The album will be released on July 22nd on CD by the Memento Mori. For more info, check the links below.
As the label’s publicist says: “For those who willingly have their minds warped by such unfussy sleepers as Suffocation‘s Pierced From Within, Malevolent Creation‘s Stillborn, Decapitated‘s The Negation, and Diabolic‘s Infinity Through Purification, prepare to arrive at your destination with KRYPTICY‘s The Non-Return!”
(And I might add Malignancy to that mix of references.)
MORE INFO:
https://www.facebook.com/krypticy
https://krypticy.bandcamp.com
http://www.memento-mori.es/
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label