California’s Skeletal Remains burst onto the scene extremely quickly with a debut album in 2012, one year removed after releasing a demo that same year.  So for about 10 years they have remained one of my favorite death metal bands and all their releases are of high quality. I feel their fourth album, released last […]

California’s Skeletal Remains have composed and performed one of the year’s best death metal albums with their 3rd studio full length record Devouring Mortality.  The attention to detail exhibited is outstanding.  Starting off with Dan Seagrave’s brilliant cover artwork (Morbid Angel, Entombed, Malevolent Creation), these guys clearly wanted to present the look of an early […]

One could argue that the 2015 debut album from super group  Gruesome, Savage Lands, is the current pinnacle of early Death worship, to the point where they actually almost recreated actual songs from Scream, Bloody Gore, Leprosy and Spiritual Healing. But also tucked away in 2015 was the second effort from California’s Skeletal Remains, who […]

Without having to do too much mental legwork, pondering the current state of death metal spews forth (perhaps in a literal sense) the word “boring.” It’s boring because the new crop of bands that inhabit it aren’t trying very hard; they’re just referencing their copies of Mental Funeral or Eaten Back to Life and running with it, doing as little as they can to establish their own sound. Worst of all, it’s an accepted practice. People are inexplicably excited about the retro death metal movement, even if it threatens to send the style hurdling toward the Stone Age, well before Venom could piece together a power chord. Better yet, why aren’t more bands copping Obituary? …..

So while a majority of the retro death metal resurgence has focused on the Stockholm sounds, reviving the classic tones of Entombed, Dismember, Grave and such (and there’s nothing wrong with that), what if you had a hankering for a nostalgic death metal sound that wasn’t from Sweden? What if you were craving a band […]