Arma Gathas is a riff machine. Seriously, we’ve seen it. It’s got these big slots where you feed in raw materials — guitar strings, fret boards, rusty nails, the severed claws of Black Forest wolves, barbed wire, well-oiled jackhammers, a hive of hornets that’s just been lit on fire, a gassed-up chainsaw — and on the other end are these giant fucking speakers, out of which come one blistering riff after another.

Actually, we saw the Arma Gathas riff machine in a dream. But we still think it was real, because we’ve got confirming evidence: the band’s debut album on Metal Blade, Dead To This World.

The members of Arma Gathas have honed their craft with some bands you’ve probably heard of. Guitarist and riff-genius-in-residence, Simon Fuellemann, was also a founding member of Cataract (among others). Vocalist Ché Snelting used to front Born From Pain. Lead guitarist Marc Niedersberg played with Machinemade God and Cornelius. And the resume of drummer Max van Winkelhof includes Disloyal.

You could draw a few correct inferences about the sound of Arma Gathas from the lineage of its members, but that wouldn’t give you the whole picture. To fill out those images of metal-infused hardcore, you’d need to sketch in some jolting guitar solos, some splashes of thrash and punk, a hailstorm of power grooves, some moody instrumentals, and even passages of melodic death metal.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »