Man, I’m still sweating and I’ve not done anything but sit on my ass and allow the deafening tones of Destruktor’s Nailed to wash over me…like a layer of soot. The Australian firebrands don’t care much about easing into anything; it’s about assuming the position – head down, fingers positioned on the frets, drum sticks in the air, and amps cranked to 10 – and fucking going for it! Anything else is left to the pansies and pretenders.

What we have here is not a failure to communicate. Rather Nailed kicks the groan and punches the throat with a style that marries old school death (think Drawn and Quartered, Necrovation, etc) to blasting – and sometimes thrashing – black metal. The bellowing growls, the grainy images of bullet-belted men in an Olympic synchronized haircopter competition, and the suffocating denseness is genuine. It is the stuff of mass genuflection at the feet of the ancient Death Metal gods.

Much of Nailed is straight forward blasting intensity, but it is not without compositional refinement, that is, once the dizziness from the initial body blows begins to subside. You’ll hear more variety during the second half in particular with songs like “After Death Murmurs” that lean toward blackened thrash and the rather epic (in a hate fueled shitstorm kind of way) album capper “Spawning the Immortal,” complete with naked, nefarious bass lines and effective pace changes. What can I say? Australian metal extremism and Hells Headbangers; two peas in a motherfucking pod. I’m sure a goat was involved at some point as well.

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