SWAMPBEAST
SWAMPBEAST “Offering of Chaos, Lamenting In the Blood Of Man”
By Dr. Abner Mality
This muck encrusted monstrosity lives up to its name...it’s an angry, filthy beast patched together from many parts, mean enough to tear a gator apart. It made a good impression on me with its debut “Seven Evils Spawned of Seven Heads” and now it’s back to finish me off with the even more laboriously titled “Offering of Chaos, Lamenting In the Blood of Man” (hereafter shortened to “Offering of Chaos”).
SWAMPBEAST touches on a lot of subgenres of death metal, but at all times, they maintain a raw and truly “swampy” production. Nothing is cleaned up or digitzed here. Within this murky sound you will hear the roar of MORBID ANGEL/NILE style death, the cavernous gloom of INCANTATION and its ilk, the crazed dissonance of PORTAL and even grimy black metal riffs. It’s actually pretty technical, but you don’t think of it being that way when the production is so rough and bestial. They hit on some truly whacked out riffs right at the start with “Transmutation of Human Flesh”...a great mix of PORTAL craziness and Floridian death. There are more surprises, like the black metal injected “Nucklelavee”, the mournful march that ends “Fate Relinquished” and even the spooky and subdued instrumental “Incantations of the Tarnished”, which is positioned in just the right spot.
But most of SWAMPBEAST’s trade is brutal yet catchy pounding, as on “The One Below”, the neck-snapping “Brand of Heresy” and the slow, ugly stomp of “Impetuous Black Pyre”, which has such a cool skanky riff. The more I listen to this, the more I dig it...any conversation about newer American death metal bands has to include SWAMPBEAST or else be laughed out of town.