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Album Reviews : Boris the Blade – Warpath

By on January 3, 2017

15193494_1274689792594121_6437156327024757125_nWarpath is a highly appropriate title for this album, the new album from this Melbourne-based extreme act destroys all in its path, leaving nothing but smoking carnage in its wake.

That said, this band have developed and honed their craft a little more on this album. Their output, formerly a more ‘bazillion notes a second’ tech/deathcore type of sound, has morphed into what you might deem to be an ultra-modern death metal approach here. They have backed off on the accelerator ever so slightly on this album and injected a little more in terms of groove and dynamics (check out the twisted, slow-burning Nihilist for proof of this). And it works very nicely indeed.

But they really have lost little to none of their anger and their blunt-force brutality. They have just channelled it into something just slightly more controlled and mature. In fact, they’ve done it very intelligently, they are unlikely to lose any of their committed hardcore fans, as there’s more than enough musical muscle for them to sink their teeth into, but they may just pick up a few more fans with this record too.

I like this kind of music for the dichotomy it brings: the relative slickness of the production is offset by the extreme harshness of the music itself, the throat-ripping vocals and the sheer jaggedness of the guitars. The drums sound absolutely catastrophic on this album too.

Within this sub-genre of heavy music, this is as good as anything being released from across the entire planet, and should further cement this band, and Australia in general, on the extreme music map.

About

Rod Whitfield is a Melbourne-based writer and retired musician who has been writing about music since 1995. He has worked for Team Rock, Beat Magazine, themusic.com.au, Heavy Mag, Mixdown, The Metal Forge, Metal Obsession and many others. He has written and published his memoirs of his life and times in the music biz, and also writes books, screenplays, short stories, blogs and more.