REVOCATION DOES DEATH

The March issue of DECIBEL magazine arrived a couple days ago at the NCS island. There on the cover was a photo of a smiling Chuck Schuldiner licking blood from a nasty cut on his finger. And to commemorate the magazine’s 12-page oral history of Death, the issue included a “Flexi” disk recording of Boston’s Revocation covering “Pull the Plug” from Death’s 1988 album, Leprosy.

I stared at that Flexi disk for a few minutes, trying to think what to do with it.  I tried to shove it into my computer’s CD drive, but it was too big. I shook it really hard and held it up to my ear, but no music came out of it. I even chewed on it, but it still wouldn’t give up its secrets. Slowly, it dawned on me that this thing was meant for a turntable — y’know, those things that make stuff spin around and around, with an arm that holds a needle that somehow makes sound come out of the spinning things?

Problem is, we don’t have any turntables here at NCS. So that Flexi disk is destined to go through life as a coaster.

Then, just as I was resigning myself to having to imagine what “Pull the Plug” would sound like as performed by Revocation, that dim bulb in my head flared briefly and I remembered an e-mail I’d gotten earlier in the week from NCS contributor BadWolf telling me that the Revocation song was streaming over at MetalSucks. I hadn’t been anyplace where I could listen when that e-mail arrived, and then I just forgot about it. So I guess that Flexi disk served a purpose after all.

If you happened to miss that song-stream over at MS, don’t make the same mistake twice — you can stream the song here, right after the jump, and you should, because, to use a journalistic term of art, it’s hot shit.

We’ve written about Revocation a lot in these pages because they are superb. They are superb on disk and they are superb live and, well, we greatly admire their superbness. And as this cover of “Pull the Plug” demonstrates, they just get superber and superber as time goes by.

Revocation is just finishing up the recording of their third album, to be released by Relapse Records sometime this summer. We’re expecting high levels of superbidity when it comes. Revocation’s superb guitarist David Davidson has been quoted as saying: “The songs on the new release are incredibly varied and all have the own character. They range from technical thrash to groove laden death metal, [and] there’s even a song with a full horn section this time around. We can’t wait for people to check it out!” Well, fuck, that makes two of us, because I can’t wait to check it out either!

In the meantime, here’s Revocation’s take on “Pull the Plug”. There’s only one word for it: Superb.

Revocation “Pull The Plug” by Decibel Magazine