Review by Sandre the Giant
What do you get if you cross members of Entrails and Visceral Bleeding, Transcending Obscurity’s most recent run of quality releases, and old school death metal? Well you get Necrophagous and their debut full length, ‘In Chaos Ascend’, due out in January! Can this hang with the rest of the TO roster though?
First track proper ‘Order of the Lion’ provides a strong cases immediately, bringing you straight into the murder scene with a potent Cannibal Corpse-inspired piece that rumbles, clatters and roars its way into your mind. Necrophagous play their death metal with a healthy dose of classic American death, from Florida to New York and back again. ‘At Dawn Thee Immolate’ is the mangled child of Suffocation and Deicide, while the mighty Incantation loom large over the swaggering, roiling groove of the title track. Simply put, I love the fact that the guitar tone here doesn’t sound like a chainsaw to be honest, as there is plenty of OSDM to take from that doesn’t reside in the frozen Scandinavian north. Ironic considering their Swedish homeland, but it is always good to not give in to sterotypes. There are massive, swaying breakdowns that bring to mind Immolation, or ‘Covenant’-era Morbid Angel, as well as a guttural brutality in the likes of ‘Wolf Mother’ that is particularly on point. My personal favourite track though is ‘Horns of Seven’, which feels like it has crawled directly from a lost Morbid Angel demo, such are those mighty Azagthothian guitar riff bends.
‘In Chaos Ascend’ feels like a quintessentially old school death metal record that doesn’t rely on an HM-2 pedal and some nostalgic reference points. Necrophagous have a huge amount of respect for the classics, but they bend and shape that sound for their own nefarious means, and in doing so have created a surprisingly catchy and listenable death metal record. All hails to the Blood God, for this is a mighty offering.
https://www.facebook.com/necrophagous.sweden/
https://necrophagousband.bandcamp.com/
The Killchain 