Fistula
Goat
Crucial Blast
Connoisseurs of metal usually love them a good serial killer (or three). Charles Manson is usually the first obvious touchstone, but real death metal sickos go way deeper and more obscure – much like their taste in music, oddly – collecting true crime books that divulge all sorts of ghoulish crimes that maybe didn’t have the same PR savvy as ol’Charlie. That’s just the way underground metal has been for years now; shit, Cannibal Corpse and the likes of Mortician and the Meat Shits made whole careers out of this. Well, with the release of Goat, Fistula (please DON’T look up what that name means) have blown this whole racket right out of the water. You want serial killers? You want societal sickness? The songs on Goat are all based around the crimes of an Ohio area rapist and serial murder. Instead of lurid voyeurism or a breezy ain’t-it-sick-_Faces-Of-Death_ kinda attitude, Fistula take a hard, unflinching look at what these kind of crimes do to the individual and society at large. Interspersing copious news clips into their music which is a wounded howl of pain and frustration and indignation over a crawling, fuzzed-out sloppy morass of blunt-edge doom and early purposely amateurish death metal. I’m thinking Grief, Asphyx, Eyehategod, Autopsy, The Body – the ones that make your ears hurt. All overloaded and staticky and feedback worshipping.
This is painful listening, agonizing and drawn out and lingering. This is not a celebration, this is not fun.
Crucial Blast: http://www.crucialblast.net
