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Live CARCASS photos from the Fillmore in Silver Spring, Md., by Peter Atkinson

Ah, spring. At last, it has finally, well, sprung. And with it come cherry blossoms, tulips, daffodils — and death metal. CARCASS and BEHEMOTH already have blazed a trail across the states. The New England Metal and Hardcore Festival just wrapped and MESHUGGAH and SEPTICFLESH/FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE tours are on the way. And in my neck of the woods, over Memorial Day Weekend, there’s the Maryland Deathfest in Baltimore — even though I don’t think I’ll be going this year since I saw the big draws, DARK ANGEL and AT THE GATES, back in the day. Still, after a brutal winter, why not a brutal spring?

CARCASS: Sweet Redemption

The metal comeback story of, perhaps, ever was the triumphant release last fall of Surgical Steel, the first album in 17 years by English legends CARCASS. Defying nearly all expectations — which founding guitarist Bill Steer admits were decidedly low in many corners to begin with — Surgical Steel drew near universal acclaim as one of 2013’s best albums and, amazingly, raised the bar for modern extreme metal.

For a band that had already pioneered gore-grind in the late ‘80s and melodic death metal in the early ‘90s — before imploding in a hard rock hot mess with 1996’s prescient Swansong — Surgical Steel showed that not only were CARCASS still relevant and vital, they were inspired and had something left to prove. No mere nostalgia trip was this, CARCASS meant business. Indeed Steer, bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker and new drummer Dan Wilding financed and recorded the album on their own before securing a deal with Nuclear Blast.

Upon its release in September, Surgical Steel quickly became the fastest-selling, best-received album of the band’s career. “We were seriously shocked by it,” said Steer, during a phone interview from Atlanta prior to the second date of the just-concluded Decibel Magazine Tour with THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, GORGUTS and NOISEM that CARCASS headlined. “I’ve met plenty of people who’ve cheerfully admitted that they expected it to stink."

“We’re not the kind of people who have high expectations. We just believed we made a valid album and that it would be interesting to the hardcore CARCASS fans, but not necessarily anybody else. So as we watched the reviews coming out and so many of them were favorable, that was surprising, and then by the end of the year, we were being included in a lot of ‘best of’ lists, which was rather nice. It’s outstripped anything we would have imagined.”

The debacle that Swansong became, and the coinciding the label and lineup problems that eventually drove CARCASS apart before it even was released, left the band’s legacy in a bit of a shambles — despite its crude and crass, yet groundbreaking early works Reek Of Putrefaction and Symphonies Of Sickness, 1991’s transitional triumph Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious and 1993’s melodic death metal benchmark Heartwork. Before reuniting for a series of shows in 2007 — with Steer and Walker joined by guitarist Michael Amott, who’d left after Heartwork to eventually form ARCH ENEMY, and drummer Daniel Erlandsson taking the place of Ken Owen, who suffered a near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage in 1999 from which he is still recovering — CARCASS had become something of an underground footnote.

The reunion shows that continued through 2010 — and included a short “Exhumed to Consume” tour of the United States — certainly helped re-ignite interest in CARCASS. But when Amott and Erlandsson returned to ARCH ENEMY full time, a big question mark still hung heavy around the band and their future.

Surgical Steel has helped not only to restore CARCASS’ good name, but bring the band to a prominence they had approached in the past, but never were quite able to attain.

“It’s something that you could look upon as validation for what we’re doing,” Steer said of the response to Surgical Steel. “I won’t deny it. From my experience, everybody wants recognition for what they do — some are just a bit louder about it than others (laughs). We don’t take any of this for granted. Yes, we’re well aware of the danger of oversaturation in the media, and some kind of backlash because that always happens when a band from an underground background starts to filter out to a slightly wider audience.

“There’s always going to be somebody who’s an elitist who resents that, because a lot of this music is founded on that kind of attitude, you know, that this stuff isn’t for everybody and we should keep it to ourselves. I don’t really look at things like that anymore, but I can understand the mindset, because I used to be that way.”

With new second guitarist Ben Ash in tow, CARCASS have been touring quite steadily over the past year, starting with sporadic small club shows and the odd festival appearance — such as last year’s Maryland Deathfest — before a more substantial march through Europe supporting AMON AMARTH. Prior to the 21-date Decibel Magazine tour of the U.S. and Canada, the band played a few unconventional gigs, first on the 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise and then as part of METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett’s horror-themed Fear FestEvil in San Francisco.

I saw the final date of the Decibel tour at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, Md., and CARCASS were in top form, playing a 20-plus song, 95-minute barnstormer of a set — accompanied by occasionally gruesome medical procedure projections on video screens behind them — that highlighted material from every stage of the band’s career, even the much-maligned Swansong with the inclusion of “Keep On Rotting In The Free World”. It was the third time I’d seen CARCASS since they reunited — and second with the current lineup, which Walker somewhat unfortunately described from the stage as “two old men and two young boys” — and each time out the band have delivered a more energetic, intense and confident performance. The “Exhumed to Consume” show I saw in Baltimore in 2009 with Amott and Erlandsson was stiff and business-like by comparison, and even last year’s more ferocious Deathfest performance was a bit tentative. But in Silver Spring, the band were loose, lethal and everyone really seemed to be enjoying themselves as they blasted away.

“The band is way tighter than it was when we originally did the reunion,” said Steer, who was particularly energized during the Fillmore show. “I don’t mean that disparagingly towards Daniel and Michael, because they are great musicians, but this situation is different because we are able to practice now, everybody lives in the same country and everybody prioritizes this band, so if we need to get the rehearsals in, we can. No one else has anything else to do that’s going to take precedence over this.

“All of us still have some things going on on the side. Jeff still has BRUJERIA occasionally, and I still play with GENTLEMAN’S PISTOLS, but neither of those bands are that active at the moment. It’s really enjoyable to do that, you get loads of perspective as a musician playing in another band. It’s always a learning experience. I would really miss that. If I can carry on playing with GENTS, it’s fantastic, but this is my main thing. I started a band called CARCASS when I was 15 years old, so that’s a large chunk of my life.”

Over the coming months, CARCASS will tour Japan and Australia and play a load of European festivals. After that, it will be time to contemplate a follow-up to Surgical Steel, a somewhat daunting prospect considering the unexpectedly enthusiastic response it earned. Steer is resigned to the fact that there will be expectations on the next album that were not there for Surgical Steel, but he is confident in the way forward as far as new material is concerned.

“That isn’t a worry, the whole subject of whether there will be enough ideas, I think it’s more quality control because we’ve always been obsessed by that, the only difficulty is the expectations are raised enormously in the public,” he said.

“People didn’t expect anything from this record, so we had the opportunity to surprise them. But now it’s very hard to make another record that will be as surprising, I’d say impossible. It may be a stronger record, but it won’t have the same impact because people know that we’re capable of doing something halfway decent.”

MASSACRE: Back From Beyond. Again.

Another comeback by a death/grind notables from back in the day hasn’t drawn quite as much attention as the return of CARCASS, but with the release of their first album in nearly 20 years, Florida’s MASSACRE are back in business — yet again. Formed in 1984, the band were an on-again, off-again proposition even prior to the release of the one-two punch of 1991’s legendary From Beyond album and the 1992 EP Inhuman Condition. The band fell apart soon thereafter and since then have mostly been off-again.Founding guitarist Rick Rozz resurrected the group for 1996’s reviled and quickly forgotten The Promise album, but MASSACRE soon went dormant, perhaps with good reason, and stayed that way for a decade. Frontman Kam Lee put together a new MASSACRE lineup in 2007 — with bassist Terry Butler being the lone holdover from the From Beyond/Inhuman Condition era — but that too quickly fell apart.

Rozz once again reformed MASSACRE in 2011, with Butler again onboard, and this time things seem to have gelled. With drummer Mike Mazzonetto and vocalist Ed Webb filling the ranks, the band have been playing out somewhat regularly and signed on with Century Media in 2012 for what eventually became the Back From Beyond album that was issued on April 1. As the title would indicate, Back From Beyond harks back to the band’s brief From Beyond heyday with its chugging riffs and rhythms, Rozz’s signature whammy-laden dive-bombing leads and a smattering of creepy HP Lovecraftian lore. But it also sounds stuck in time.

MASSACRE don’t really bring the sound of old forward all that much — nor the artwork for that matter, the cover is essentially a knockoff of From Beyond with a different color scheme, which seems disappointingly lazy. Back From Beyond has a sound a feel that is more 1994 than 2014 — although the production is quite a bit better and fuller — and Webb is a pretty standard death metal screamer, lacking the distinctive grunt-and-growl character that Lee brought to the table.

Back From Beyond is a serviceable old-school death metal album. But after a 20-year wait, I guess I was expecting something more than that. C

DEVIL YOU KNOW/KILLER BE KILLED: New Groups, Familiar Faces

While some old timers are picking themselves up and dusting themselves off, a pair of interesting new “super groups” has emerged in recent months featuring current or former members of a host of different bands from across the metal spectrum.

Perhaps the most notable, given its all-star lineup, is KILLER BE KILLED, a band founded by DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN vocalist Guy Puciato and SOULFLY/ex-SEPULTURA frontman Max Cavalera — who, with his experience with NAILBOMB and CAVALERA CONSPIRACY, is no stranger to these sorts of things. The pair recruited MASTODON bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders and ex-MARS VOLTA drummer Dave Elitch for what would, on the surface — given the members’ varied musical backgrounds and stylistic footings — seem the makings of a pretty eclectic combo.

The band’s self-titled debut, due out in early May on Nuclear Blast, however, takes a much more straight-ahead metal approach. Mix the snub-nosed thrash of CAVALERA CONSPIRACY with the roiling rhythmic sensibilities of MASTODON and you’ve pretty much got KILLER BE KILLED in a nutshell. The spasmodic dynamics of DILLINGER or MARS VOLTA are notable in their absence, which is kind of a shame. But, by the same token, proggy fits or tangents probably would take away from the full-frontal, ass-ripping power of “Fire To Your Flag” or “I.E.D.” or the infectious hooks and choruses of “Dust Into Darkness”. So perhaps that was a smart move after all.

And you get plenty of dynamics in the vocal presentation here as Puciato, Sanders and Cavalera weave their voices together with serpentine finesse on every track. It’s surprising just how well they all fit together and work within the context of the songs, so, again, the decision to stick to a simpler, more direct musical approach was for the greater good. So while KILLER BE KILLED aren’t as adventurous as some might like, at least not yet, the album is a winner nonetheless. B+

Also due soon on Nuclear Blast is The Beauty Of Destruction, the debut from DEVIL YOU KNOW which features ex-KILLSWITCH ENGAGE frontman Howard Jones, ALL SHALL PERISH axeman Francesco Artusato, DEVOLVED drummer John Sankey and BLEEDING THROUGH bassist Ryan Wombacher. Beauty is a bit more of a mixed bag, with elements of the technical death metal and metalcore mixing with straight-up metal and even some power balladry that take into consideration all of the members’ backgrounds.

The big, clean-sung choruses of Jones’ time with KILLSWITCH are there in abundance, often running counter to his otherwise “bad cop” screaming, Artusato’s frantic riffing and booming hooks, and Sankey’s scattergun time-keeping — most notably on the lead single “Seven Years Alone”. Indeed, given the number of times the band go to that well, there is something of a formulaic feel to Beauty.

Things get a downright weepy midway through with the epic ballad “It’s Over” that would have gone down like gangbusters in the ‘80s. Here, it seems more of an aberration, especially since it’s followed by one of Beauty’s more brutal tracks, “A Mind Insane”, powered by Sankey’s rivet-gun drumming.

“As Bright As The Darkness” is a more ethereal, less obvious ballad and concludes the album in a sheen of breathy vocals, synths and strings. “Crawl From The Dark” and “Shut It Down”, by contrast, boast an almost brown-sound bottom end, and are the album’s most forceful, ominous numbers with their shuddering riffs coming close to echoing Meshuggah.

So there’s plenty to keep you occupied on The Beauty Of Destruction. And though the album’s picture-perfect sound is a bit too slick, it still packs a pretty good wallop. So if there’s more to come from DEVIL YOU KNOW, Beauty lays a fairly solid foundation for the future. B

NEW AND NOTABLE

While BEHEMOTH’s latest The Satanist has drawn a monopoly of the metal press attention since its mid-February release — and with good reason, given frontman Nergal’s triumphant battle with leukemia, not to mention the fact that it’s a pretty fucking amazing album — there is, or soon will, plenty more new death/black/etc. metal from around the world that is certainly worth of note. For instance:

• ABORTED — The Necrotic Manifesto (Century Media Records)
  Hard to believe a band as extreme as Belgium’s ABORTED have been able to hang around for as long as they have — especially given their myriad lineup changes. But here they are, about to mark their 20th anniversary, and showing no signs of mellowing whatsoever. The Necrotic Manifesto, their eighth album, is death-grind at its most feral and uncompromising. With new guitarists Danny Tunker and Mendel bij de Leij having come aboard since 2012’s Global Flatline, ABORTED are more technically adept and vicious than ever. Manifesto is an all-out raging shitstorm of guitar grind, concussive grooves, blast beats and frontman/lone original member Sven De Caluwe’s tonsil-shredding shriek-and-puke vocals about all manner of horror, depravity and death — or any combination thereof. The old splatter movie dialogue samples are a bit cheesy and tired, especially for a band of ABORTED’s veteran stature and obvious chops, but I guess some habits die hard. Otherwise, Manifesto rules. A-

• AUTOPSY — Tourniquets, Hacksaws And Graves (Peaceville Records)
  Since reanimating in earnest in 2010, Oakland death metal icons AUTOPSY seem to be making up for the time they lost during their 15 years in limbo. Tourniquets is the band’s third album since reuniting – and throw in an EP and DVD, and they’ve been busy little beavers. That’s not to say quantity does not equate to quality. Tourniquets is textbook, top-notch AUTOPSY: chunky, sludgy, gnarly and unrepentantly raw. The old- school, natural production is a nice change from the sterile, over-processed death metal you hear so much these days, and the tempestuous mix of surge-and-slog tempos, gut-punch riffs and Chris Reifert’s snarling/gurgling/barfing vocals is as gruesomely effective as ever. B+

• BENEATH — The Barren Throne (Unique Leader Records)
  Icelandic death metallers BENEATH are a startlingly accomplished lot despite — or perhaps because of — operating far outside of traditional circles. The band’s tech-death histrionics are as sophisticated as they are brutal, with the guitar tandem of Jóhann Ingi and Unnar Sigurðsson sawing away for all they’re worth over Ragnar Sverrisson tornadic drumming. Yet the Sigurðssons punctuate all this ferocity with deft solos, tradeoffs, harmonies and the occasional crushing hook, which brings an element of accessibility to The Barren Throne and keeps things from becoming uber-technical and indulgent. New vocalist Benedikt Natanael Bjarnason is a bit of a one- dimensional growler, but that’s a pretty minor complaint about an otherwise rather brilliant second album. A-

• ENTHRONED — Sovereigns (Agonia Records)
  Belgian black metal mob ENTHRONED unleash the 10th album of their somewhat star-crossed 20-plus-year career, the comfortably old-school sounding Sovereigns. Forgoing the modern temptations of light-speed velocities and overbearing orchestration — or, by the same token, low-fi “true kult” minimalism — ENTHRONED keeps things gritty, well-balanced and satisfying. Though new drummer Menthor — the band’s sixth since founding drummer Cernunnos hung himself in 1996 — gets a blast-beat fueled workout on “The Edge Of Agony”, “Divine Coagulation”, “Nerxiarxin Mahathallah” and “Of ShrinesAand Sovereigns”, the band mix in nifty slower about faces, lurching grooves and sparse, eerie spoken passages to give Sovereigns depth and intrigue. Frontman Nornagest’s commanding, occasionally schizophrenic vocals boast a genuine menace that a lot of black metal yowlers lack, since he knows not to overdo it when things do get weird, and bring plenty of venom to ENTHRONED’s bluster. These guys may lack the name recognition or reputation of the genre’s upper echelon, but they do a better job than most of delivering the black metal goods here. B+

• HOUR OF PENANCE — Regicide (Prosthetic Records)
  Italy’s HOUR OF PENANCE are into their third drummer in as many albums, and it’s easy to understand why. The band simply wear them out with their furiously paced technical death metal offering some of the most blindingly fast tempos and dizzyingly complex arrangements around — rivaled by countrymen FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE, though with a more sleek and streamlined attack sans any orchestration and operatic vocalizing. James Payne is the man of the, umm, hour here on drums, and he performs admirably as the band actually ease the throttle back just a bit on Regicide. It isn’t quite as consistently unrelenting as 2012’s Sedition, despite breakneck tracks like “Redeemer Of Atrocity”. But there’s still plenty of twists, turns and straightaways to navigate here, and Payne handles it all with the aplomb of a Formula 1 driver. B+

• INSOMNIUM — Shadows Of The Dying Sun (Century Media Records)
  After their surprisingly mellow EP Ephemeral last fall that marked the debut of second guitarist Markus Vanhala (also of OMNIUM GATHERUM), Finland’s INSOMNIUM return to a more familiar melodic/melancholic death metal footing with their sixth full-length. Shadows Of The Dying Sun, is big, bold, brash and bleak — with an emphasis on big. The wall of guitar here is simply massive as Vanhala and Ville Friman alternate between cascading riffs and soaring harmonies, with some fleet, folk/black metally interplay mixed in. There is certainly no shortage of oomph here, especially with the slightly brisker overall pace the band embrace. Yet while not as mopey or somber as past efforts, Shadows still has a grim, icy soul that is accentuated on more methodical tracks like “Lose The Night” or “The River”. And the title track pretty much speaks to our nothingness, so some things truly never change. B+

• NEAR DEATH CONDITION — Evolving Towards Extinction (Unique Leader Records)
  Swiss deathsters NEAR DEATH CONDITION channel HATE ETERNAL and mid-period MORBID ANGEL rather liberally on this their second album. The turbulent riffing and rhythms and sleek, soaring soloing are right out of MORBID’s Covenant-Gateways to Annihilation-era songbook — when HATE ETERNAL mainman Erik Rutan, not coincidentally, was in and out of the band. Even the slowed down “The Anatomy Of Disgust” recalls Covenant’s “God Of Emptiness”. The strafing drums, horrific layered vocals and occasional otherworldly arrangements, however, offer more of a HATE ETERNAL approach. Either way, there’s a lot going on here that’s going to make you think you heard something like it somewhere else before. Still, Extinction has its moments of distinctive brilliance. The furious, dogfight guitaring on “Praise The Lord Of Negation”, for instance, is just insane, as are the Voivody freakouts on the calamitous “Anagamin”. Just wish there was more where that came from here. C

• SEPTICFLESH — Titan (Prosthetic)
  Greek symphonic black/death metallers SEPTICFLESH really stepped up the “symphonics” with their last album, 2011’s The Great Mass, employing an orchestra, choirs and female vocalists to liberally slather classical/gothic elements on top of their already grandiose music. Titan, their ninth album, lays it all on thick yet again, utilizing the PRAGUE PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA once more, and perhaps more prominently. Indeed, like DIMMU BORGIR and CRADLE OF FILTH before them, SEPTICFLESH seem unable to resist the temptation to overindulge, once they got a good taste of orchestration. And, as with DIMMU’s Abrahadabra or CRADLE’s Damnation And A Day, Titan offers too much of just about everything — except abrasive metal. The wash of strings, horns and choirs on the opener “War In Heaven” almost drown the band out, although SEPTIC do follow it by flexing their muscle with the fittingly flame-throwing death metal of “Burn”. But that, too, breaks into an orchestral section near its conclusion. The otherwise magnificent, Middle Eastern-tinged “Prototype” or more epic “Prometheus” stagger under the weight of the additional instrumentation and vocals, which they probably don’t need — at least in such mass quantities. And the strings on the ultra-brutal “Confessions Of A Serial Killer” come off sounding like a swarm of bees. Not sure what’s up with that. Regardless, SEPTICFLESH give you a lot of fat the chew through here before you get to the meaty metal underneath — too much, in fact, for my taste. B-

• TRIPTYKON – Melana Chasmata (Century Media/Prowling Death)
  The Tom G. Warrior-led ensemble TRIPTYKON have grown a bit more comfortable in their own skins in the four years since the band’s seething debut Eparistera Daimones emerged in the aftermath of the implosion of his longtime labor of love CELTIC FROST. Eparistera seemed more about capturing the spirit of FROST, and using it as vehicle to vent spleen — metaphorically and literally — about that band’s acrimonious dissolution. Melana Chasmata, by contrast, has its own personality and a less vengeful vibe, even though the overall sonic palette is not that dramatically different. Melana is more fearsome and aggressive, opening with the mammoth eight-minute grinder “Tree Of Suffocating Souls”, but at the same time looser and less calculating. It’s a hell of a lot easier to warm up to, even if it is still rather ambitious and bleak. Each of Melana’s nine tracks is an epic unto itself, with but two — the stampeding “Breathing” and the hypnotic, almost “Twin Peaks”-like closer “Waiting” — sneaking in at under six minutes, and in both case by a matter of seconds. But here, each song feels like a journey, instead of mere catharsis — save for sledgehammering drone of “Altar Of Deceit”. “Aurorea” builds from a shimmer of guitar to caterwauling crescendo. “In The Sleep of Death” is eight minutes of quaking doom whose evocative lyrics ache with despair and desperation. “Black Snow”, is even more sprawling and monumental, a 12-minute death march during which Warrior mournfully notes, “every step I take, life recedes.” Grim sentiments aside, Melana Chasmata is a grand, captivating album. A

• VADER — Tibi Et Igni (Nuclear Blast Records)
  Though they’ve been overshadowed in recent years by fellow countrymen BEHEMOTH, Polish stalwarts VADER are certainly no slouches. Their masterful ninth album from 2011, Welcome To The Morbid Reich, was one of the best in their long career and they follow up it with the equally strong Tibi Et Igni. Having long since eschewed experimentation and grandiosity for dependability and sheer power, VADER once again deliver a punishing effort highlighted by mainman Piotr Wiwczarek and Spider’s buzzsawing riffage. They settle into attack mode from the get go on “Go To Hell” and rarely let up, save for the awesomely epic crusher “The Eyes Of The Abyss”. Tibi Et Igni won’t dazzle you with dexterity, but it will put a boot so far up your ass you won’t really notice, much less care. A-

• WHITECHAPEL — Our Endless War (Metal Blade Records)
  Tennessee deathcore brutes WHITECHAPEL took something of a deathlier turn with their eponymous fourth album in 2012. This time around, however, there’s a decidedly “core” vibe, with the focus less on dynamics and more on bludgeon. Despite the bowel-loosening, djent-like tone here, the band’s triple guitar attack is dense and deliberate, built around haymaker riffs and lumbering breakdowns — with occasional fits and starts of death metal fury. But this approach gives Our Endless War a leaden feel that grows a bit tedious as the album progresses, slowing to a near crawl on “How Times Have Changed” midway through before picking up with the undulating “Psychopathy” and “Blacked Out”, which offers hints of black metal. Maddog frontman Phil Bozeman’s typically hateful diatribes also take a more overtly political/socially aware bent at times here, from the title track’s “let’s take back our justice for all” battle cry to the self-explanatory “Worship The Digital Age”, which is not necessarily a bad thing, it just adds to the album’s “core”-ness. Still, he’s not above misanthropy — barking “kill yourself, your kids and your wife” at the conclusion of “Mono” So Bono he ain’t quite yet. B-