It’s been over twenty years since Massacre released their ground breaking album From Beyond, and just over that time period since Promise, which many of us would rather not even remember as part of their catalog. But here, I can safely say that Back From Beyond is NOT Promise, it is in fact a lesson in what made nineties Death Metal great because it’s all here in spades.
Now, this is Massacre without founding vocalist Kam Lee, but that really doesn’t matter because former Diabolic growler Edwin Webb does a fine job of filling his shoes and it also helps that two of the members of Death are present to add to that nineties feel. This is the album I have been waiting for from them, a prime slab of quality Death Metal and an apology for the aforementioned Promise album. There is nary a blast beat on this album, which is just fine because Massacre never needed that to begin with. From eerie intro “The Ancient Ones” comes the first real indicator of how this album is going to roll, as it leads into the first real track, “As We Wait to Die“, the crushing opening riff plants a combat boot clad foot in your face and just keeps beating the shit out of your ears. Their guitar tone hasn’t changed either, it’s still as razor sharp as it was on From Beyond and the drums aren’t all clickety-clack.
There are a couple mid-tempo tracks to flesh things out, it’s not all full speed ahead. “Hunter’s Blood” is a nice break from the one/two punch of the aforementioned track and “Ascension of the Deceased“ is a totally raging track, so they do slow things down for quite a few songs actually, “Succumb to Rapture” is all slow churning, oily black sludge, but it’s all good, because even at a mid pace, Massacre is still crippling brutality at it’s best and Back From Beyond is such a good comeback that it shows they don’t need to go 100mph to put out a good album.
Having said all that, it’s obvious by this point that I’m all over this album, but I just hope that this isn’t a one-off and then we don’t hear from them for another twenty years. But even if that were the case, I think that this would be a good end of career piece of work.
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I’ve never been so pissed off buying a record as I was the first time I put Promise in my CD player back in high school. I kept reading about this awesome band Massacre, and then I bought that piece of garbage. I should have known from the cover art it was going to suck, but I still consider that possibly the worst metal album ever. Even with my previous prejudice against the band for that, this sounds pretty awesome.
on Jun 5th, 2014 at 09:57i think i have brought promise about 4 times in used bins, either forgetting how bad it was, hoping it will grow on me or hoping it just gets better. but no- im out 99 cents every time dammit.
on Jun 5th, 2014 at 10:49I had heard this band’s debut, but I was unaware of the “Promise” album. Hearing that it was that bad, naturally I immediately rushed to youtube to see if someone had uploaded it so I could check it out.
It’s bad.
on Jun 7th, 2014 at 08:15Yeah, I guess this does make up for Promise. That album was so bad it made me want to punch babies. Lol.
on Jun 8th, 2014 at 02:22Grabbed this cheap- kinda dig it. Certainly better than Promise and really feels like From Beyond pt 2 with a classic vibe. Only issue is my jewel case version has the bonus tracks listed, but they are not on the cd
on Jul 18th, 2014 at 07:43