Damonacy was a short-lived death metal band from New Jersey, and after a few short years from 1988-1990, they split. They did record a song, “Expectations”, in 1994 for a compilation that never was released. I can’t quite remember, but I may have seen them live during their active years. I saw multiple shows weekly back then. This Grotesque Treasures contains all their material, which really was not that much, and yes, the 1994 song is on here. Track 1 is the Expectations promo 1994, Tracks 2 and 3 are the Therapeutic Morbidity 7″, Tracks 4-8 are the From Within demo, and Tracks 9 and 10 are taken from a 1994 live performance.

Everything is remastered for optimal sound, and let’s get to the opener, “Expectations”. The one thing you immediately notice is the Northeast death metal sound. Opening with a brutal, heavy groove. The recording is standard for that time period, and any self-respecting fan of bands around that area, like Internal Bleeding, Pyrexia, and Embrionic Death, was fans of the Damonacy sound. One could even argue these bands kind of all influenced one another with their demos all coming out around the same time, as well as playing shows together in like 1991/1992. Brian Worland had a similar delivery, not as deep as Pyrexia’s first singer Darryl Wagner. This song has it all with the blasts, gutturals, and emphasis on slammin’ grooves with killer guitar riffs.

“Corpulent Carrion”, from the 7”, has a certain fuzz to the guitar tone, which was an influence on many bands in NY at that time. Hell, our guitarist with Internal Bleeding, Anthony Miola, was a huge Damonacy fan. He always talked about them, as was our bassist Brian Hobbie. This song even has the isolated guitar riff early on before it erupts, very similar to Internal Bleeding’s “Anointed In Servitude” moments. The snare drum sound pops and cuts through the heaviness and some of the fast guitar riffing, over the blast beats, dare I say, has a slight black metal-ish feel to it. The grooves are in abundance on this song, and vicious, angry vocals. The demo songs have definitely been cleaned up so much and truly sound excellent.

“Infernal Desolation” sounds excellent with the opening blast beats. As expected with this style of slammin’ death metal, the song then goes into a monster groove and then goes into a doomier, slower groove, which we would eventually hear on the Immortal Suffering demos from back then, outta NY. “Carcinogenic” has the poppin’ gallop in the beginning, then right into the groove, then back into the faster paced moments with a strong Obituary influence for the vocals. More of the doomier passages come in, and I guess that is where the band differed from the other above mentioned bands. Damonacy used doomy moments and quite a bunch of evil riffing was going on.

Believe it or not, the last two songs, which are live, are actually excellent, and the recording is not muffled at all. These appear to be soundboard recordings, and honestly, if you had drowned out the intro to the song banter as well as some of the fan noises, you would think these songs were recorded from a demo. Both are top quality early 90’s East Coast death metal songs.

Grotesque Treasures is an excellent compilation to showcase the short-lived band Damonacy and their songs they recorded. Being from NY and eventually joining Internal Bleeding back then, I think if I told IB when I joined, I had never heard of Damonacy they would have attempted to jump me in the parking lot and give me a blanket party, which could have resulted in a hospital job. Damonacy had an impact on that scene, and it was not uncommon to go to shows or when I would look at the crowd from the stage, to see Damonacy shirts being worn by fans. Get this now!

[Visit the band's website]

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