“NGHRYAAAAAGH!”
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, I cannot get these demented evil-witch snarls out of my mind after a couple listens to “The Lost Album”, the most recent cassette/digital release to be crapped out by one of Boston’s most face-melting underground metal assault teams, DEATHAMPHETAMINE. This is a raging whopper of a tape that took more than 2 years to come out (via Providence’s OBSCENITY CULT RECORDS) due to the album’s masters being stolen, and some resultant broken friendships / relationships etc. according to the band’s website. Oops!
Well, whatever, it seems worth it to my ears. “The Lost Album” at its foundation is a speedy, ruthless, intense, fist-pumping collection of 9 tunes (plus intro) that display an effortless mix of headbanging thrash riffs, deadly razor-sharp blastbeats, catchy melodic hook-y metal riffs, and metallic punk passages, all sequenced into a seriously infectious and FUN listening experience. It’s varied and creative enough to keep you wondering which flavor of insanity comes next, but cohesive enough that you could identify the band within 30 seconds of hearing ’em. Such a delicate balance is hard to find in any scene and deserves a characteristically throat-ripping “Bravo!”
But that’s not all, yo! DA’s other aspects deserve their own congratulatory snarls, too. For one, they embellish their jams with all sorts of ridiculous cherries, the most noticeable being the crotch-grabbing, screeching, wailing rock’n’roll solos sprinkled liberally throughout. The intro to “The Last Man” teases by sounding like classic epic Metallica before switching gears into melodic crusty hardcore and then exploding into blasting thrash. “Stalinizer” features some majestic Maiden / Purple dual guitar shit and “More Sauce For the Goose” treats us to a truly freaky, harmonically odd, and futuristic guitar lead. Best part of those two tunes, however, are the unexpected and PRICELESS power metal yelps…. YES! Speaking of which, let’s not forget the majority of the vocals: high-pitched shredded screaming and rude nasty snarling accompanied by some evil lower death metal bellowing, once again all hacked out in extremely catchy, varied and memorable lines that are just as integral to their sound as the riffs.
I can keep going about the album’s earthly death/grind/punk/black/thrash/hc qualities, and how at points I was reminded of all sort of random things (Kreator, Iron Maiden, Defleshed, Dark Funeral, Slayer, Poison Idea, Motorhead, Tragedy, etc. etc.) but it’s more than all that. Go get it yourself and rage out to DA’s apeshit energy, riffs, and peculiar sense of mischief that is, as far as I can tell, unavailable anywhere else.
(P.S. I’m too lazy to write about the ridiculous dystopian concept behind the whole album, so let that be more incentive to hunt it down yourself, jerks!)
Buy the cassette here for $5 from OBSCENITY CULT records:
-CL
MORE: http://www.facebook.com/pages/DEATHAMPHETAMINE/106983795999021
