DEATH KILLER – Total Destruction of the Entire Universe
Release Date: 19th January 2024
Label: Last Day of the North
Bandcamp
Genre: Avant-Garde Extreme Metal
FFO: Oranssi Pazuzu, Grave Pleasures, Sapata (whose vocalists appear on this record), Igorrr.
Review By: Jeff Finch
Disclaimer: I am not the intended listener for Death Killer, in a typical sense. After listening to this record and attempting to absorb what it was dishing out, it’s fairly clear that my love of Avant-Garde has a limit: The Mars Volta, Imperial Triumphant, bands like that. Where even though the chaotic nature can be hard to absorb, where a groove might only make itself known periodically, there is a still a bevy of enjoyable music, captivating yet not easy to digest. Death Killer, as any listener will know after listening to this record, Total Destruction of the Entire Universe, does not care about that, and adheres to very little in the way of blueprint, creating a haunting, punishing soundscape that really and truly sounds like the albums namesake, forcing the listener to just watch as everything is burned and destroyed.
Right off the bat, with tracks You Know Nothing about Meta and Goodbye, Willhelm, the overblown production is palpable, making you question if your speakers have blown out, the former blind-siding listeners with machine gun drumming and vocals that sound pulled from the bowels of the underworld, while the latter has a, dare I say, dancing quality to it, interspersed with pounding drums, pulsating beats and, unless I’m mistaken, a cowbell. If nothing else can be said about these two tracks, and outside of just staring at your speakers in awe, little is probably going to come to mind immediately except “huh?”, it’s that they are captivating for the sheer intensity they contain and the aurally verbose nature of every single note.
I Hate People is, strangely enough, a fairly straightforward sounding track; low, downtuned, industrial riffs can be pulled from the sonic maelstrom and sound heavy as hell, while the vocals are hard to understand outside of the chants of ‘I hate, I hate, I hate people.’ And honestly, that’s all there is to it, the song is loud, abrasive, but oddly catchy at points. The Witch and Snakes both fall into this same semblance of ‘enjoyability;’ the former is industrial black metal with everything in the damn recording software cranked to unhealthy levels, the vocals still strong enough to pierce through the caul, riffs maintaining very little semblance of genuine musicality but so gratingly harsh that they go along with the rest of the track beautifully and are, dare I say, the piece that fits the whole thing into as cohesive a unit as one can expect at this juncture. The latter, while sharing most of these traits, also has incredibly punishing bass, rattlesnake noises, and, were it not for such a purposeful distorted mess of production, deep riffs and vocals that would be genuinely enjoyable and not in just a ‘didn’t expect this’ way.
A song like Dentist is where the listener feels something going off the rails, if one can infer they were ever on the rails to begin with; a lot of feedback, pounding drums, and noise, so much noise. At points, it sounds like a garbled video game that’s on its last legs, at other points the sound is so abrasive you’d swear you were hearing glass breaking over shrieking but through speakers on their last legs. It is truly a track that defines ‘noise’ and, while haunting in the hellish soundscape created, to call it a song is pushing the boundaries of the term. Though not nearly as intense or chaotic, the same can be said for finale Emotional Life, which, over the course of its sub-two minute time-frame, is an exercise in restraint for the most part, just some occasional drum beats that sound like they’ve been struck on a trash can (St. Anger, anyone?) and some dissonance. That’s all.
Nobody Survives might be the least aggressive, yet simultaneously most aggressive, song on the record; to be perfectly blunt, it’s black metal through and through, tremolo riffs, shrieks, machine gun drumming, production toned down a bit to let the actual music flow through the speakers. It says something about an album that a song that would fit in on most raw black metal albums is considered the most normal and arguably least intense track, sonically speaking. But at this point, everything Death Killer has done defies expectations, should there have been any to begin with.
And finally, Retro = Shit really embraces the industrial bombasity and avant-garde nature of the band, as the track opens with a groove that would fit in during the 60s before, almost literally, punching and slapping that away for that overblown, overproduced, riff driven beat all the while the vocals take a lyrical dump on the sound of the opening, defining the song title, the deep voice spewing ‘fuck you and your fucking retro shit’ cutting through the music like a demonic entity through a beat up tape recorder. And yet, the song still finds a way to segue into a dance beat at one point and a frenzied percussive overload towards the end.
Exhausted yet? I am. Talking about each song in an album can sometimes be a bit much, but for a release like this, it seemed the only way to do so; each song has something in common with every other song, but each one is done so differently in so many ways that absolutely no moment on this album TRULY feels recycled. It’s so damn chaotic, bombastic, loud, intense, and otherworldly, that, even though it’s not enjoyable in the standard sense of an album (i.e. straight through, feeling like a cohesive unit), it’s something so brazenly different from anything I’ve ever listened to that I feel captivated to recommend that you listen to it for, if no other reason, the ability to say that you’ve done so. Death Killer is not for everyone, it’s not for me, but dammit everyone should at least give it one listen because it’s an extraordinary sonic experiment and experience.
(3 / 5)
