Along with Dark Descent and Willowtip, Deepsend Records are one of my favorite independent US based labels, especially when it comes to pure death metal. They’ve had a solid spring summer releasing quality albums by the likes of Offending, Synapses, the always reliable Dawn of Demise and even got into the reissue game with reissues of material from Coffins and Gates of Slumber. Heck, they even recently signed Malaysia’s Humiliation based entirely of my review! (well, that may not be completely true, but I like to think so).
Tucked away in all that activity was the sophomore full length debut from California’s Deadly Remains. Apparently formed as more of thrash/death metal act, Severing Humanity is supposedly the bands first foray into more brutal/ technical death metal, and its a scorcher. There’s a lot influences going on here, but the biggest ones I hear are are the standard USDM bands like Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse and more brutal, Unique Leader bands and to me, a whole lot of early Dutch legends Sinister….on steroids.
Deadly Remains has a pretty unique sound, I imagine in part to their thrash background mingling with modern brutality (i.e. one of the standout tracks “Scriptures of Foreign Tongues”) . The Sinister -y sound is technical and precise yet skronky (“Cosmic Necrosis”) and chaotic, and they have a fairly unique sounding vocalist in Ian Andrew who has a distinct, powerful tone, without being too gurgly. The riffs are stop/start and scattershot with plenty of bad intent and a few solos and hefty grooves for good measure, all wrapped in in a stout but clean production, that also has a little of its own flavor.
From lurching opener “Home Invasion” through the excellent “Equilibrium Obsolete” to the aforementioned closer “Scriptures of Foreign Tongues” (with the exception of interlude ” Psalm of Impurity”) simply delivers top notch modern, brutal death metal, without being too slammy, noodly, melodic (this is no Gorod or Sophicide) or plastic. This has weight, heft and depth, and much like this years Antropofagus release, is a must have 2012 death metal release.
