As I peruse through albums I might consider year end candidates I see a lot of black metal; …And Oceans, Abduction, Kryptamok, Aara, Afsky, Eisenkult, Glaciation, Marrasmieli  to name a few. But there is very little truly special  death metal.Sure there’s some good stuff like the always reliable Abysmal Dawn,  The Project Hate‘s Purgatory or […]

When I heard a few months back that Ulcerate was working on a new album, I couldn’t have been more excited.  I own their entire LP catalog, and after seeing them live in San Antonio 4-5 years ago, I was floored at the atmosphere they create and the fact that they were able to produce […]

Technical death metal is a demanding trade–and not just in terms of sheer speed and accuracy. Bands fall prey to various traps in the tech-death world: songs that overstay their welcome, boggling the listener’s mind with endless flurries of notes; a lack of musical coherence as the songs change tempo and/or time signatures over and […]

New Zealand’s Ulcerate set the bar pretty high for themselves with 2009’s Everything is Fire, a monstrous slab of churning, atonal death metal that ended up on many 2009 year end lists, mine included. How would they respond? The album title says it all. Even though the formula is the same as on Everything is […]

Looking for some straight forward, old school death metal with grooves and traditional song structures? If so, then stay as far away as possible from any of Ulcerate’s three full-length releases. The New Zealand trio is the quintessential forward-thinking Willowtip act, even more so than most other groups on the roster, not to mention modern death metal in general. Angular, shape-shifting rhythms, guitar work that is more about the painting of sonic pictures than popular notions of riffing, and a vibe in both lyrics and music that is suffocating in its bleakness. As such, The Destroyers of All is in fact all that and a bag of chips. Drummer/composer Jamie St. Merat, uh, opens that bag to reveal its contents…something like that anyway.

New Zealand’s ULCERATE are currently in the studio working on their third full-length album and second for Willowtip, titled The Destroyers of All. To document the recording, ULCERATE has created a special website (www.ulcerate-official.com/The-Destroyers-Of-All) that includes a making-of blog, photographs, and video clips. The site will continuously be updated until the release of the album […]

After the clinical tech death assault that was Of Fracture and Failure, New Zealand’s Ulcerate has made a few changes to their sound and thankfully replaced vocalist Ben Reed (bassist Paul Keland now performs vocals) and the end result is yet another simply killer Willowtip release and one of the most striking death metal albums […]

New Zealand’s ULCERATE have finished recording their new album, Everything Is Fire. Scheduled for an early 2009 release, Ulcerate’s second full-length album further refines and expands their work on 2008’s Of Fracture and Failure. Punishing, churning dissonance mixed with their trademarked sense of melody and textured rhythm work, coupled with a greater foray into mood […]

Willowtip is very pleased to welcome New Zealand’s ULCERATE to their official roster. Dummer Jamie Saint Merat comments on the signing: “Ulcerate is really looking forward to calling Willowtip home, a label we’ve respected for a long time, and whose reputation for quality bands and quality service is something we really identify with. It’s feels […]

Originally released on The Flood Records back in 2007, Deepsend has dug up this collection of Ulcerate’s first two demo CD’s and given fans a chance to hear the bands early material, before 2007s blisteringly impressive Of Fracture and Failure. Consisting of 8 tracks, four from the band’s untitled 2003 demo and four from 2004’s […]

From the same coalition that brought us the excellent Sickening Horror release, comes another phenomenal technical death metal release from a part of the world you would not usually expect, this time in the form of the full length debut from New Zealand’s Ulcerate. Though not quite as experimental as the Sickening Horror release, Of […]