Returned to Life

The new LP from these Canadian death metallers offers a bizarre accentuation of known and loved tropes within the genre. All the trappings are there; the sludgy, down-tuned guitars, the unbridled atonality, the whimsy and playfulness of the riffcraft, the nods to doom metal along the way. But all are filtered through a very post millennial pallet of exaggeration and specificity. Is ‘Returned to Life’ and entirely new beast, or is it simply tweaking at pre-existing norms? Nudging at the boundaries of death metal’s timbre range.

Well, to answer that question let’s look to the most obvious background function in this regard, the sludgy-as-fuck mix. The guitar tone is so down-tuned and swampy that it almost no longer feels like listening to a distorted guitar. It’s akin to walking through a muddy swamp and feeling the squelch of saturated slime beneath your feet. Or, maybe more appropriately, like touching rotting flesh and feeling it offer no resistance to the pressure, an upsetting mash of matter forgoing structural integrity.

Drums are rich and warm, but in the context to which they are thrown offer something that could be called clarity. The patterns and rhythms are nothing remarkable besides a consistently tight percussive pounding. But in this gooey setting they offer an olive branch of solidity to cling on to. Vocals waltz back and forth from the guttural to mid-range monstrous rasping. There is a pronounced aggressive undertone to their delivery that perfectly matches the all-encompassing, clingy, muddy tones that the guitars drench us in.

The guitar tone itself is so bespoke that it places very real dictates on how the music actually takes shape. On the whole it’s a solid rendering of Autopsy meets Demilich. There is an undeniable groove and bounce to a lot of the riffs that gives them the old school flavour of (whisper it) “fun” that’s missing from the endemic darkness that pervades the many borders of modern extreme metal. The overall tone and atmosphere engendered is one of claustrophobia, of smothering dampness and putridity. But the playful rhythms and mid-tempo grind these tracks often settle on give a sense of revelry to this suffocation. This idea is also brought to fruition with a cover of Celtic Frost at their most urgent and punky on ‘Into the Crypts of Rays’.

When the pace picks up to a blast-beat any clarity in the guitars is lost to the inertia of the muddy tones; only with clear, staccato markers are the riffs able to retain any clarity at these faster paces. But along the way the music is also happy to settle on a doom metal breakdown, kept pleasingly brief in order to function as a moment to pause and contemplate the alienating and clammy horrors that await the next burst of speed.

So, in answer to the question “is ‘Returned to Life’ an entirely new beast?” we’ll have to come down in the negative. It feels this way because Altered Dead’s approach to revivalism draws attention to subtly different aspects of the Autopsy/Demilich brew than what many of their contemporaries offer up. This is furthered by the fact that these guys certainly know how to string some decent riffs together into a pleasing and disgusting concoction. But break down the constituents, and recover from the impact of the sludgy guitar tone after the first listen, and you have a solid rendering of death metal as we know and love it. A service to the form, but falls short of a signpost to total reformation.

Originally published at Hate Meditations