Peaceville and Chris Reifert. Two names, one outcome – an essential new album.
Of course, if you’re familiar with either name, you’ll know that this comes with the slight qualification that it’s an essential album for people who saw Event Horizon and thought that hell might be a nice place to visit.
Still, that mild caveat aside, The Dying Hunt is the third album from death metal supergroup Static Abyss. This time out, the core duo of Chris Reifert and Greg Wilkinson (Autopsy) are joined by Chad Gailey (Necrot) for an eleven-track blast of necrotising death metal, crust, and doom. It may not be pretty, but it sure is awesome.
Demonstrating their resolute commitment to zero fucks, Static Abyss open the album with the unhinged death-grind of Skull Blasted. Delivered at about a gazillion beats per minute and yet possessed of a dirty groove that evokes a romantic night spent in Norman Bates’ basement, it’s one savage opening gambit. Up next, Lobotomized at Last is a surprisingly catchy ditty, more punk than metal, with a driving rhythm that worms its way into your cranial cavity and lodges itself there.
Having established the album’s sadistic tone, the band launch into the title track, which proves remarkably accessible. Constructed like a sonic Liquorice Allsort, with the sweet outer casing of death metal hiding a bitter core of doom, it’s a layered treat that underscores the potency of this demented three-piece. No such nuance can be found on the frantic Wall of Delusion, which contents itself with simply battering the listener over the head with a series of blunt objects for little over a minute. It’s followed by the similarly short, sharp Once A Corpse (Always A Corpse), which completes the subjugation of the unfortunate listener with a series of riffs so fast you can imagine smoke pouring from Greg’s fretboard.
Having comprehensively flattened the listener, Static Abyss finally take pity, of a sort, and slow the pace on the doom-laden Bleeding in the Fog, Chris vomiting the lyrics into the microphone. The level of disdain this man can achieve with a guttural sound, let alone a word, remains impressive, while Greg and Chad provide a suitably apocalyptic soundtrack to match. Following the previous track’s monolithic doom finale, the schizophrenic Sinew Leech has fun shifting between tempos, from evil groove to blistering grind-storm and back. It’s followed by Nowhere Forever which offers some of the album’s most mesmerising doom, with lead work from Greg that is surprisingly hypnotic.
The final third of the album runs the gamut of Static Abyss’ sound. The scarifying Defleshed and Forlorn just about manages 80 seconds before collapsing under its own weight. The searing Volcanic Womb initially maintains the tempo before segueing into a darker, harder groove, eventually landing on a doom riff that is more My Dying Bride than Morbid Angel. The album wraps up with the slow-motion horror of Darkness at the End of the Light a pitch-black finale that throws in occasional stabs of grind-infused death metal, but only as a means to further emphasise the potency of the riffs that surround it.
If you like Autopsy, Abscess, or any of their grimy ilk, then Static Abyss is for you. Devastatingly heavy, surprisingly catchy, and delivered with all the passion we have come to expect from its progenitors, it’s brutal old-school death-doom at its finest. 9/10
