Blast(beat) from the Past: Defecation

Defecation
Purity Dilution
Nuclear Blast
1989
Defecation is Mitch Harris’ personal Tiktaalik. It’s a transitional fossil that unites the malformed punk of his earliest efforts in Righteous Pigs and the death-grind hybridization of Napalm Death. Harris closed out the ’80s by roping in his brother by another mother, drummer Mick Harris, and the duo churned out Purity Dilution, a tidy little half hour from an era when two and three minute blast fests were not unheard of.
Purity Dilution was a huge step forward for guitar Harris’ songwriting after Righteous Pigs and he has a palpable chemistry with drum Harris (amazing what a drummer who can actually keep the beat will do for you). Given their simpatico and the way Defecation blended their two prior bands, it must have been a real shock for music fans the next year when Napalm Death went full on death metal on Harmony Corruption.
That anomaly aside, Purity Dilution was a distilled dose of Harris’ songwriting sensibilities. There are the familiar riffs that would populate Napalm Death’s third wave albums once Harris and Jesse Pintado settled into the riff duties. “Scrutiny” is one Barney growl away from slotting without notice on Utopia Banished. Even the pastiche  artwork evokes Napalm Death’s sensibilities. Produced by Danny Lilker, Purity Dilution’s warm, low slung chug sounds like a Napalm Death album put through a Bolt Thrower filter.
Mitch Harris played all of the instruments on a second Defecation album in 2003, but part of Purity Dilution’s charm is hearing two Napalm Death conspirators rip out a fun album that has a strong core without the baggage of their bigger band’s name hovering over the project. There’s a looseness and a freedom to the first Defecation record that makes it a charming artifact of a bygone era.

G&P Review: Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky

Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky
The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry
Nuclear Blast
If nothing else, before I sliced the shrink wrap off of The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry, Florida’s Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky had already notched a fairly significant achievement: making me give a shit about a Nuclear Blast album for the first time since In Flames dropped Clayman nearly a decade prior.
But even that achievement pales when you realize every aspect of SWWAATS’s full length debut has been honed to lethality by precision death metal craftsmen with an added boost of Sunshine State death cred courtesy of producer James Murphy.
Guitarists Aaron Lee Haines and Ian Sturgill put the spazz in freak-core unit Bodies in the Gears in the Apparatus, but like their former frontman Joshua Vitale (who briefly belched life into tofu grinders Khann) the six string duo go for something meatier and more visceral and menacing than BitGotA’s light footed trickster rhythms. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave the prior band’s wordiness behind, though. “Automated Oration and the Abolition of Silence,” the album title and even the band’s name all suffer from a bad case of abomination of unnecessarily augmented composition monickers.
But I quibble because SWWAATS have developed one of the most intriguing personas currently working in death metal. From the snake handler freak show lyrics to Colin Marks’ robed menace art, SWWAATS conjure the same mystique that cloaked the earliest incarnation of Cancuckleheads Kataklysm. Lead off track “10,000 Sermons, 1 Solution” interweaves wailing Eastern melodies through the chunky death metal foreground.
Though the chunky death metal is the star, SWWAATS give sample swiper Jen Muse her moment to shine on the audio pastiche of “Retrograde and the Annointed.” SWWAATS also cleverly subverts doom cliché on death crawl “Colossus,” the shortest song on the album that clocks in on a respectably grind-paced 90 seconds.

My only other -- extremely minor -- complaint is frontman John Paul Coollett II's roar -- as visceral as it may be -- could have used a better supporting cast to provide some texture.
More than a tribute of Florida metal days gone by, The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry is a vicious resuscitation of a near-moribund sound retooled for the 21st Century.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Kataklysm

Kataklysm
The Mystical Gate of Reincarnation
Nuclear Blast
1993
Metal and the occult are a partnership as old Black Sabbath, but not many bands delved quite as deeply into the hidden lore of the universe as Kataklysm, whose original frontman Sylvain Houde constructed elaborate tales of the nether realms, establishing the ethos of the sole purveyors of Northern Hyperblast.
While the band has since devolved into generic into another generic death metal band with Houde’s departure and bassist Maurizio Iacono’s ascent to the microphone, The Mystical Gate of Reincarnation found Kataklysm at their most primitive musically, ripping out elaborately arranged song suites about the flimsy barriers between life and death.
Jean-Francois Dagenais summoned elder gods with the guitar solo on “Mystical Plane of Evil” – a lesson in discordance with notes seeming struck at random – while “Shrine of Life” conjures a tribal stomp Obituary guitar chug for most of its running time. Drummer Max Duhamel seems intent on establishing his legacy as a premier metal skinsman from the needle drop with the mechanically tight opening blasts and fills of “The Orb of Uncreation.”
While full length albums Sorcery (which has been reissued with Mystical Gate in tow) and Temple of Knowledge would find the band buffing out its rough production edges in favor of a more palatable sound, The Mystical Gate of Reincarnation remains an overblown classic of the era.
Unfortunately, without the power of Houde’s lyrical flights of fancy and the force of his voice and personality, later Kataklsym albums were marred by ill-advised musical adventuring (the unlistenable metalcore of Victims of this Fallen World) before settling on the death metal most people have come to associate with the band. But the later incarnation lacked the personality and charisma that made early Kataklysm something truly special.