Holy fuck, this is some good, goddamn heavy ass shit.  Warcrab is an English sextet that plays self-proclaimed death/sludge metal and they ain’t fuckin’ joking with that labelling.  Rampaging grooves, a nice mesh of guttural growls and sickly screams, dirty speed-ups, mid-tempo double-bass blasts and three guitarists with two digging into the riffs while Geoff Holmes plays lead on top, yields Warcrab a very individualistic sound on their second full-length Scars of Aeons.  If you slowed down and fed Bolt Thrower a diet of sludgy Crowbar fat then embalmed them in Autopsy’s tomb with Incantation, Paganus, Celtic Frost and Winter as the morticians and finally gave Iron Monkey permission to read the last rites you’d be on the right track to understanding what these disease spreading famine masters sound like.

“Conquest” is teeming and bustling with eerie noise until Rich Parker slams into a booming thundercloud beat that’s perfectly syncopated against the melodic lead guitar work.  The dual riffs of Paul Garbett and Leigh Jones lay a foundation so heavy it’d crack a bulldozer in half.  Martyn Grant’s vocal range straddles a hooker’s pussy directly between sharp screamgasms and vomiting growls intent on going down.  Surges of mid-paced, thicker than titanium death metal blasts take down DM bands that are 10x faster than Warcrab’s top speeds because the sheer impact and immovable heft of these segments can’t be touched.  Extensive soloing and a dirty, crusty Napalm Death vibe slowed down on a cocktail of Vicodin and Oxycontin also crawls across the band’s sound like maggots and mealworms on a mission.  Applying a blistering Sabbath groove to scuzzy, dirty Winter inflections renders “Destroyer of Worlds” an up-tempo beating that melts into an icy negative riff midway through that’s forked tongue licked n’ sealed by Frost, Grief and Winter.  Despite a few obvious influences these guys have a highly original sound that isn’t afraid to put a complex, melodic solo on a dingy pile of pills doom riff surrounded on all sides by rhythms that could suffocate a world class body builder.

A forlorn, forgotten melancholic riff intros “In the Shadow of Grief” with each guitarist entering the fray one by one to create this noose-ready doom n’ death jam.  Just as you slip your neck into the rope of suicide doom, the song frantically, effortlessly moves into a pulverizing death metal blast chasing away demons with the desire to mosh your problems out.  A searing 70s lead in a death metal packaging reminds me heavily of a much more disgusting version of Convulse later on (circa Reflections) with Sabbath-fried riffing completely fitting the atmosphere.

The awesomely titled “Bury me Before I’m Born” places a larger emphasis on the flesh eating diseased screams as full-throttle, wildly soloed death metal crescendos break your body apart like a ship caught in the shallows as the sludgy shark toothed grooves devour what’s left of you piece by piece as you see it all happen before your eyes close for good.  The title track is the album’s longest, moodiest piece; scraping and rolling resin ball riffs that melds the drug-addled heartbreak of Crowbar with Autopsy’s merciless toilet overflow ooze.  Again healthy, breast bitin’ doom riffs punch through the thrash-y chugs and eagle scream solos while the percussion goes completely kooky and fill crazy until the song claws its way to catharsis via spine bending sludgy powerchords and another harmony-drenched solo that’s almost neoclassical in its grace and grandeur.

Warcrab’s flawless mixture of death metal, doom, sludge and slow grinding thrash easily place them among my top 10 favorite death metal bands of the last decade.  Make no mistake because vintage, groove-oriented DM is the main ingredient here but the fact of the matter is that these guys are so tight with stylistic change-ups and textured, layered slaughter intricacies it’s damn tough to really compare them directly to anyone else out there and that’s why this album fuckim’ rules the radioactive roost!

[Visit the band's website]

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