Sunday Sesh: Do the Splits with Nucleus and Macabra
Spend your Sunday getting weird with this new surprise split from Nucleus and Macabra.
Aren’t splits wonderful? Two (or three or four!) similar yet distinct bands coming together and offering up either unreleased tracks or brand new ones that offer a glimpse into a band’s evolution (or lack thereof). Sometimes, on the most joyous of occasions, we’ll even get a full length’s worth of material between the two bands. Each of these is the case for the new split between Nucleus and Macabra, and boy is it a bruiser.
Nucleus is a name that should be familiar to those around these parts as their debut, Sentient, was one of the better and more off kilter death metal albums released last year. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the three songs here are the band’s strongest to date. Each track varies wildly from the one that precedes it. Opener “Fragment” sees the band channeling their inner Timeghoul (I KNOW I’M SORRY, BUT IT’S THE APPROPRIATE COMPARISON HERE) as the winding riffs funnel into a strange harmony buried underneath almost chant like cleans, while “Assimilation” sees the band in full-on doom mode. Their final song, “Beacon,” is more akin to Sentient than the two tracks before it, but that certainly isn’t a bad thing.
Macabra, on the other hand, is a band I was wholly unfamiliar with before this split, and that was evidently a mistake. For the Macabra half of the split, Mark Riddick brought THE RIFFS. I mean all of the riffs. All of them. “Breath Thief” alone has enough to fuel every shady black metal band that people “only listen to for the riffs” and then some. Now, said riffs are only so good without quality composition, and Macabra brings that too. The songs dance around a fair bit, never stay in one place for too long, and always keep you guessing just like any good death metal should.
If you like your death metal both spacey and freshly exhumed, then this is about as much of a sure thing as you’re ever going to get. I’ve had it on repeat pretty much non-stop since it popped up on Friday. Unfortunately it looks like it’s only available on Spotify and iTunes at the moment, but info on a bandcamp/physical release should be coming pretty quick.
In the meantime jam out if you can, check out that siqq Seagrave art as best you can (no high res screens yet), and let me know some of your favorite splits from this year in the comments.
