Description

Black vinyl with lyric insert. Limited 500 copies

A split single between the American blackened thrash death act Kommandant and the American black death metal combo Fever. It starts with the Chicago based Kommandant and their track Deathwish, contrary to its title, in the beginning sounds sprightly and enthusiastically, almost life-affirmingly. Like a trumpet sounding to battle. This is mid-tempo black/death metal with breakdowns into the blastbeat-almost-grindcore speed attack. Short and sudden breakdowns, as wasp bites. With that the double bass pedal sound is brought almost to the forefront of the song. The most interesting starts in the second half of the song, after the bridge – the solo tremolo picking, sounding so insinuatingly, making you wait for a long blastbeat. But there is no blastbeat, neither short nor long. Instead of it we hear a semi-epical / semi-thrash metal (or even heavy metal) mid-tempo bravura melody. Right, it’s almost a military march, a good old military march. Needless to say, by contrast to the material of their latest work, for Kommandant this track is unusual and even extraordinary. Everything was made strictly according to canons on the Blood Eel album: aggressive and atmospheric militant black/death metal in which the late Mayhem and, yes, old school death metal were clearly in evidence. And the militant part was created in no small way by the martial industrial techniques. While Deathwish is rather a soundtrack to wartime footage, a visual chronicle (of WWI, rather than WWII I think). Anyway, this music is very vital to be a picture of the soulless war machine. That’s why I found the Kommandant song so extraordinary in comparison with the previous material. In contrast to them, in the Fever case everything is more or less clear. The song begins with a blastbeat attack on the edge of grindcore, well savored with old-school guitar solo in the vein of Nocturnus, – and then throughout the song they keep their momentum going. The song is described as a ferocious mix of Angelcorpse and Mysticum – a true comparison, but the fact is that for death metal in the vein of Angelcorpse, the heart wants the acoustic drums, and when a drum-machine is programmed just to copy their patterns, you get a feeling of something is missing. It’s only towards the end of the song the drum-machine taps out a typical Mysticum industrial drum pattern, and that’s really original, really brutal, it’s really a ferocious mix of Angelcorpse and Mysticum. It would be interesting if these songs presaged a new chapter in the history of both bands. And if this is some one-off event, then these songs are just material for the compilations, which will be released someday.

Track list:
1. Kommandant -Deathwish
2. Fever -Devil On Treads