Track Premiere: Gravewards Have “Souls Twisted Beyond Recognition”
There’s no such thing as too much death metal.
We’re just a little over halfway through the year and 2018 is already absolutely stuffed to the gills with quality death metal. It seems like we’ve been saying that every year for the past few, but it remains true with each year somehow topping the last both in terms of quality of releases AND in sheer volume of them. Well dear reader, I’ve got bad news and good news for you: like the terminator, new death metal releases absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead, BUT we have a really quality one for you today if you can hold on to your life.
Hailing from Athens, Gravewards specialize in a groovy yet technical kind of death metal, easily maneuvering between chug-chuggery and angular, spiderweb riffs. The song we have for you today, “Souls Twisted Beyond Recognition,” is a perfect distillation of their sound.
The whole affair starts with a hefty triplet groove reminiscent of perhaps Suffocation, but those thoughts are quickly erased when the vocals charge in over top, delivered more in a hardcore bark than the low gutturals you would expect to overlay the instruments here. Things ease up a bit, offering a small breather and a peek at those aforementioned spiderweb riffs, but it doesn’t take long for that peek to turn into an eyeball full of fretboard madness. The track dances between these heaving grooves and winding riffs effortlessly before eventually settling down somewhere in between and offering the best of both worlds. The whole thing is an absolute trip and another excellent slice of death metal to scrawl on your tombstone. It may not stop until your dead, but if it’s a song like this that takes you out? Hell yeah.
Ruinous Ensoulment drops July 27th via Unspeakable Axe Records. You can order it here.
