Kontusion - Insatiable Lust For Death - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Vinyl LP pressing. 2022 from Charleston, SC rock duo Shovels & Rope. Originally planned as a stripped-down acoustic-leaning , Manticore's tracks were written prior to the pandemic, but recorded during it, when Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst suddenly had much more time at their disposal. The duo reimagined the original arrangements, resulting in 10 new songs that range in sound from heartbreaking, stark piano to rollicking hard-rock and danceable guitar and drum numbers. Manticore reveals the band's most personal stories about love, family, marriage, self-realization, and more to date, and it carves out it's own distinct place in the Shovels & Rope canon.

Having dropped their third album Choir Of Babel in early 2020 just before the world shut down, the forces of pandemic did not succeed in silencing NYC's Ruin Lust for good. Though confined to their fallout bunker, the band, with martial fervor, began work on what has now, three years later, emerged as their fourth album Dissimulant.In the final phase of imperialist rot, Ruin Lust declares war against the festering delusions of a devolving species. The most withering aspects of modern death metal, grinding war metal and black metal's more bestial tendencies compel this audial exorcism, poisoning the well like a bioweapon spread through open air, suffocating and contemptuous. By the time album closer InchChemical WindInch is done, all that remains are parched bones and desiccated shadows.Barbarically pestilent yet compositionally deliberate, Dissimulant casts a bitter pall and leaves an open wound on the death metal scene for 2023. A militant milestone in the Ruin Lust discography.

Pacific Northwest's Caustic Wound (featuring members of Mortiferum, Cerebral Rot, Fetid, and Magrudergrind) play unrelenting and punishing brutal death-grind that captures the aesthetic and palpitations of the classic old-school era of the genre (not exceeding 1992 of course). Their debut album, Death Posture, which follows their 2018 Grinding Terror demo, sounds like a foul relic that could have been produced in '88-91, while upholding a powerful, dark, murky yet unyielding production. This debut eschews and lays waste to the clinical, plastic and ornamental trappings of the modern-day grind scene. In what will most likely despoil and maraud the majority of current death-grind albums, Death Posture renders total annihilation upon the feeble mortal coil.