On the fourth Friday of each month, we review five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever’s been sounding good. This month, we’re dealing with metal. More specifically, death metal, because as summer comes to an end, it’s time for downtuned riffs and guttural roars. So let’s get in the pit!

Alto saxophonist Charles McPherson once told me that he thinks bebop is the most highly evolved form of music because once you master its intricacies, you can play anything else. Abhorrent Expanse’s second album, Enter the Misanthropocene, is a superb example of the application of death metal aesthetics to improvised music. One cannot improvise death metal; it’s a rigorously structured music that demands extraordinary skill to play. That said, what Abhorrent Expanse prove is that, somewhat in line with McPherson’s theory of bebop, a mastery of death metal allows you to improvise with those tools, and in the process create something pretty amazing. Take, for example, “Dissonant Aggressors” (its title a parody of “Dissident Aggressor”, a Judas Priest song later covered by Slayer). It begins with a thick bass boom, before the band’s two guitarists, Erik Fratzke and Luke Polipnick, improvise simultaneously in a Derek Bailey-meets-Pat Metheny (a thing that really happened) sort of way, and then drummer Tim Glenn lays down an air strike of blast beats as they continue undeterred. The album’s nearly 11-minute closing track, “Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment”, goes in an entirely different direction. It features synth and glass harmonica from Craig Taborn, a dude with impeccable jazz bona fides but a powerful love of metal, and it’s a droning, eerily atmospheric piece that seems forever building to a catharsis that never arrives, not unlike Neil Young’s Arc, the half-hour collage of feedback from his 1991 US tour. The album-opening title track does a third thing; it’s a series of noisy grindcore-ish outbursts (Polipnick’s vocals remind me of Brutal Truth’s Kevin Sharp) with Mick Barr-esque soloing, broken up by synth drones from Jesse Whitney. This music is improvised, and/but it has the discipline and aggression of death metal. Unsurprisingly, it’s left some more hidebound metalheads confused, even hostile. Judge for yourself.

Speaking of metallic improvisation, drummer Carolina Pérez showed folks how it’s done on Mama Killa, her Burning Ambulance Music release with guitarist Ava Mendoza and violinist gabby fluke-mogul. Laying down the thunder, she pushed the other two to ecstatic heights of shred and dissonance. That album came out in July, and now she’s back with the second release from one of her main bands, and another all-female unit, Castrator. Coronation of the Grotesque is my absolute favorite kind of death metal — the face-ripping, floor-punching kind (think Vader, Deicide, Lost Soul, and other bands that make you want to stomp your boots as you headbang). Pérez and bassist Robin Mazen are the co-founders and primary songwriters, so this shit is heavy, and the beats are absolutely relentless, but guitarist Sara Loerlein is a demon whose riffs are like being whipped across the face with a car antenna and whose solos squeal, squiggle and soar. Vocalist Clarissa Badini delivers furious lyrics decrying sexism, cruelty and exploitation in a voice that’s somewhere between Deicide’s Glen Benton and former Arch Enemy frontwoman Angela Gossow; at her most ferocious, her voice sounds like sticking your face in an open furnace door feels. And she’s got a way with a “blurgh”, too, as you’ll hear about 90 seconds into “Covenant of Deceit”. This is one of my favorite metal albums of the year, and I think it’ll be one of yours, too. Like everything in this column, it’s on Bandcamp.

In fact, Pérez and Mazen were interviewed on Bandcamp Radio a couple of weeks ago; they talked about Castrator, but also discussed Mama Killa and the Gruesome album below, so go listen to that, then come back here for three more recommendations…

Cordyceps are originally from Las Vegas, but are now based in Colorado. Hell Inside is their second album, coming five years after Betrayal. The band is the project of Rafael Gonzalez, who played everything but the bass on the debut; that was handled by Robert Jarman. This time out, Gonzalez is just the vocalist — the amazingly named DeLorean Nero is on guitar, Chris Rosset is on bass, and Michael Nolan is on drums. This is punishing, brutal stuff. The drums are so dependent on digital triggers they almost sound programmed. The guitars are a jagged sheet of noise, while the bass is a rumble somewhere in the lower middle of the mix. Gonzalez’s vocals are a mix of gurgles, porcine squeals, and lyrics delivered as though through a mouthful of ground meat, and they’re doubled and even tripled at times to sound like a horde of demons roaring and growling all around your head. But every once in a while, the music pauses so an ominous, almost ambient synth can give your ears a moment’s rest, and when everything starts up again it feels that much more crushing. This is modern, high-tech death metal, but it’s got the old-school power of an underground classic like Vital Remains’ Dechristianize.

Robin Mazen of Castrator is also in Gruesome. The best way to explain Gruesome is… you know how Weird Al Yankovic is best known for his parodies of pop songs, where he changes the lyrics to well-known hits with satiric intent? Well, he also does what he calls “style parodies”, where he writes an original song in the “voice” of a well-known band like Devo or the Doors. Gruesome are effectively doing the same thing with the work of pioneering death metal band Death — writing original songs that sound as much like Death songs as possible. And since Death’s music evolved substantially from album to album, Gruesome are doing the same. Their debut, 2015’s Savage Land, was an impeccably crafted tribute to Scream Bloody Gore and Leprosy, while 2018’s Twisted Prayers drew equally from Leprosy and Spiritual Healing. Now, on Silent Echoes, they’re paying homage to Human, the 1991 album that for many fans (including me) inaugurated Death’s greatest era, which continued on Individual Thought Patterns and Symbolic. Gruesome’s songs have the complex riffs and intertwining guitar harmonies of the music that inspired them, but their work stands alone — even if you’ve never heard a note of Death’s music, this album is well worth your time.

Have Unbirth ever toured with Undeath? If not, some booking agent should totally get on that. These Italian tech-deathsters have been around since 2005, but they only make an album once every five years. Their debut, Deracinated Celestial Oligarchy, came out in 2013; Fleshforged Columns of Deceit arrived in 2018; and Asomatous Besmirchment landed in May. I love this kind of thing — complex, savagely aggressive riffs punctuated with squealing pinch harmonics, blasting drums, vocals delivered in a rottweiler/drill-instructor growl/bark obviously inspired by Deicide’s Glen Benton, the occasional unexpectedly beautiful guitar solo — and Unbirth do it really well. “Granfalloon”, the track above, features one of the aforementioned guitar solos, as well as a title drawn from the writing of Kurt Vonnegut. See? Metalheads can too read!