BATTLEGRAVE/ RELIC

BATTLEGRAVE     “Enslavement”

RELIC                    “Crown Of Flies”

By Dr. Abner Mality

Here are a couple of acts who say they are going to take my head right off. Let’s see if they can match that boast…

RELIC is located a lot closer to home, hailing from the fertile Southern Wisconsin extreme metal scene. They’ve got members of the illustrious JUNGLE ROT and MICAWBER amongst their ranks so there’s experience here. “Crown Of Flies” is a brief initial salvo, a four track EP where no song exceeds three minutes. No time wasted here! “The Void Between Gods” opens with cartoony super gutturals from MICAWBER’s Jeff Plewa and gets right into dark, dank and extremely cavernous death metal. From there, we got a lot of blazing brutality ala SUFFOCATION and MALEVOLENT CREATION. “Scavenger’s Daughter” has just enough melody to remind you these guys are real musicians, but no more than that. Overall, RELIC has a lot of intent to kill but not much in the way of an identity. We will see what a full length reveals…

BATTLEGRAVE is from a bit further south…Melbourne, Australia, to be exact. These guys exist at the nexus where death metal and thrash metal are almost the same thing. I detect some straight up blackened war metal ala BESTIAL WARLUST and MONGREL’S CROSS in their relentless assault, as well as some Teutonic thrash. Once they get going, they are faster than a cheetah with its tail on fire. “There Is Only Death” and “Bonesaw” get the blood pumping fast, but the middle of the album starts to add ponderous tank-like chug on “The Grand Machine of Despair” and “Marked By Evil” and they are good at that as well. Drumming is provided by the ubiquitous Robin Stone, who seems to play on almost every Aussie album these days. Like RELIC, BATTLEGRAVE struggles to find their own voice but I find their military-grade thrash like “U.S, Outpost 31” almost impossible to argue with.

If you had to choose between these two, BATTLEGRAVE edges out RELIC but not by an awful lot.

RELIC 

BATTLEGRAVE