There is something to be said about the familiar is there not? We all tend to like things that fit right into our comfort zone, they make us feel all warm and tingly and, well we can just relate to them a lot easier than things with which we are not accustomed too. This band are familiar to me for two reasons. One being that Burial Chamber hail from a little place called Sydney which is in Australia. I am quite familiar with said place because the majestic rambling idiot that is known as me (and also The Great Mackintosh when the mood suits) was born there. Now you now.
Secondly, and the most important part is that myself and my other self, That Great Idiot or whatever he is just so happen to love our death metal. So much so that I have even decided to let him (The Great MacChicken Nugget) sit in on this one. So, what do we, or I, or us both think of this band that until recently had been unknown to the collective known as me? And you think you’re confused….
Well there is death metal, and there is death metal as the saying goes. Most of it is pretty familiar to the fan, and so is this. We have both agreed on that. So I asked my selves what we thought it was that made this album so very fucking good, because yes we both agreed that it is indeed VERY FUCKING GOOD.
I (myself, who for obvious reasons will be referred to as I, or me), was grabbed from the get go by the sheer intensity of the whole delivery. Meaty riffs piled on top of a brilliant vocal delivery that would not be out of place on any piece of classic death from the golden days, and a superb rhythm section capable of changing pace at any given moment to give the necessary grunt. The Great Macintosh, apart from first saying stop calling me silly names or I’ll fucking knife you, do you know who I am, blah blah blah, likened this album to being slapped awake with a meat hook covered in yesterdays breakfast. Some other persons breakfast mind you as they hadn’t quite cleaned it properly before having at you with it. How rude.
Yes, it is gritty, but not dirty gritty. I personally would say very chunky and I love it. The Great Mackintosh would have preferred me to say as chunky as several large people that have been cut into neat square pieces of succulent flesh as is his way, but he is quite often called verbose by many, and if it weren’t for the fact that he keeps filling my mind with images of what he is going to do to me, or himself as it may be later then I would heartily agree with them.
Burial Chamber are not reinventing the wheel on this release, they are just doing death metal brilliantly. The Great Mackintosh likens it to grabbing the wheel, painting over all the shiny chrome bits with mat black and adding some spikes and chains, then smearing it in the flesh of the unworthy. Melodramatic to the last.
If you like death metal, you need to get this album. It may sound like a lot of earlier stuff, I myself picked up several influences but it is not my style to name drop very often, you simply need to have a listen and go from there. The musicianship is superb, although for mine it could have gone for a bit longer, suppose i’ll just have to play it ten more times.
The Great Macintosh concurs, although he just said fucking get into people! Or may your camels turn to fleas and fester your armpits. Charming. Ripping The Dead, should be Riffing The Dead. An essential for any true fan of the genre. Still confused? So am I. Or we….Let’s just go with the other me on this one and say JUST FUCKING GET IT!
The Metal Wanderlust 