The Ravenous
Assembled In Blasphemy
Hammerheart/Martyr
Exceedingly and understandably hyped for the duration of the year 2000, The Ravenous are a meeting of some sick, seasoned minds: vocalist Killjoy (Necrophagia/Viking Crown/Eibon), drummer/vocalist/guitarist Chris Reifert (Autopsy/Death/Abscess), and bassist Dan Lilker (Nuclear Assault/Brutal Truth/Anthrax/Hemlock/S.O.D.), with session assistance from guitarists Danny Coralles (Autopsy/Abscess) and Clint Bower (Abscess/Hexx), both of whom have since permanently joined the band. Anyhoo, Assembled In Blasphemy, the super-group’s opening salvo, may show shades of Mental Funeral-era Autopsy (especially those absolutely ripped gutsfuck-doom parts), but such a cursory read would not only be immensely off-point, it’d sell The Ravenous’ truly demented death metal criminally short. Approximating Hellhammer had Tom Warrior buried his loopy Into the Pandemonium ideas under five miles of black-as-night soot, The Ravenous go for the throat (and stay there) yet, albeit fucked out of their heads, seem more keen on mangling the mind with fumbling, so-wrong-they’re-brilliant fills and time signatures and some of the most eerily unresolved riffs and leads ever known to metalkind • overtly, kinda like ’80s death metal, but not really, basically because snuff of this sort’s neither ahead nor behind anything else, just in some other (frightening) plane altogether. An obvious and endearing nod to early Carcass however far less polysyllabically, Reifert and company even name all their specific guitar solos (“gut fondling,” “cervix severance,” and, get this, “holy ass bead pulling”), so you can surely surmise that a sick n’ twisted sense of humor runs rampant throughout Assembled In Blasphemy. And sick n’ twisted is precisely what this record is: Severely ugly, severely burly, and often quite disturbingly odd in the severest of manners, Assembled In Blasphemy is a must-have mess for the discerning death-metaller • “Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind” indeed.
Hammerheart, PO Box 277, 6300 AG Valkenburg, The Netherlands, http://www.hammerheart.com
