I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just want to be crushed flat by the metal I listen to, like an ant beneath a boot. But — as the last flow of viscous liquid leaves my mangled body — I do like to have a smile on my face. The new album from San Francisco’s Acephalix, Interminable Night, does this nicely — smashes you flat in a pool of your own goo, but leaves you with a ghoulish grin as the rictus sets in.

Catastrophic death metal really doesn’t need any bells and whistles to achieve its primal effect. Down-tune the guitars and set them spinning and belching out toxic clouds of oily smoke; load up the drums with full belts of high-caliber ammo and pull all the way back on the trigger to spray the landscape with full-auto, d-beat destruction; chain a bear to the ground and then taunt him until he’s in full-throated, pissed-off, roaring mode; then set the whole thing on fire so you get the right level of energy from the performers, and you’re good to go. That’s the winning formula of Acephalix.

But Acephalix doesn’t stop there. They’ve added bells and whistles, too, and that makes them stand out just as much as the brute authenticity of their Dismember-worshipping, old-school attack: brief but well-placed gouts of reverb-effected guitar solos, mortar-blast pounding from the drums that explode amidst the rock rhythms and d-beats, and crawling bits of death-doom to remind you that “hope” is a foreign word in the Acephalix lexicon.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »