A decade after their debut album, with a couple of EPs in between, the UK death metal band Plague Rider will see the release of their second album Intensities tomorrow, courtesy of our friends at Transcending Obscurity Records.
So close to its release, the album has already received a flood of reviews, all of them favorable so far as we can tell, and most of them striving to underscore just how unorthodox and unpredictable the album is, how devoted it is to turning listeners inside-out and upside-down.
Words like “twisted”, “challenging”, and “avant-garde” pop up, which are usually warning signs that you won’t be banging heads and humming tunes as you go, but you might already get that idea just from James Watts‘ impressionistic cover art and its interweaving of very dark and vivid colors.
Obviously you won’t have to wait long to hear all 7 tracks for yourselves, but we do have one more to premiere before the whole thing comes uncaged tomorrow. It’s the record’s penultimate gauntlet of madness, “Challenger’s Lecture“.
It’s hard to talk about “throughlines” with an album as wilfully helter-skelter as this one is (a term we use deliberately, with its violent Manson-esque references intact). The idea of straight lines is simply a foreign concept here. It’s more like a maniacally-spinning Rubik’s Cube that gets disordered again as soon as some conforming pattern emerges, or maybe like a sonic gyroscope moving at centrifugal speeds.
But there are “throughlines” in these senses: The songwriting is so bewilderingly complex and extravagantly wild that it’s hard to comprehend how these pieces were conceived, much less executed. And that’s another throughline, apart from the music’s dazzling complexity: the technical skill of the performances is just downright jaw-dropping. It’s a startling example of precision within chaos — or rather, chaos rendered with precision.
Oh, let’s mention one other “throughline” — the savagery. That comes through not only in the malignant monstrosity and berserker violence of the roaring and screaming vocals, but also in the music’s obliterating percussive batterings, low-frequency guttings, and mutilating frenzies. Plague Rider are a bunch of mad scientists, to be sure, but haven’t forgotten they’re playing death metal which hungers for all things vile, grotesque, and bludgeoning.
So, a few “throughlines”, but mainly you need to expect the unexpected, and prepare to be transfixed by all the riotous twists and turns, including those which (however briefly) open up sinkholes of dismal oppression and festering disease.
That’s a long way of bringing us around to “Challenger’s Lecture“. It’s in jet-propelled gyroscope mode from the start, dissonant and disorienting, crazed but crafty, brutalizing and bringing to bear the full horror-show cacophony of the vocals.
Sometimes the fretwork mewls, as if capturing the mutated thoughts of an asylum inmate frantically pulling the wings off flies, or skitters about like carnivorous insects at work on a fresh carcass. But the music here also seems to moan and groan in agony, to stagger like a hulking beast, and to boil in the pain of despair. At the end there’s even a point when the bass gets to grumble and growl almost by itself.
With that we’ll leave you with some credits and some links, and what we hope is an eager anticipation (maybe a breathless anticipation) of getting to hear all of Intensities tomorrow.
PLAGUE RIDER LINEUP:
Jake Bielby (Dybbuk, ex-Live Burial) – Guitar
Lee Anderson (ex-Live Burial, ex-Horrified) – Bass
James Watts (Dybbuk) – Vocals/Noise
Matthew Henderson (ex-Live Burial, ex-Horrified) – Drums
The album was mastered by Colin Marston (Gorguts). Transcending Obscurity is releasing the album on multiple formats and with lots of associated merch, and you can explore the options via the links below. At Bandcamp you’ll also be able to stream three more songs from the album — “An Executive“, “Modern Serf“, and “The Refrain“.
T.O. recommends the record for fans of Atheist, Diskord, Artificial Brain, Gorguts, Morbid Angel, Chaos Motion, Pyrrhon, Baring Teeth, and Defect Designer.
PRE-ORDER:
https://plaguerideruk.bandcamp.com/album/intensities
https://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
https://eu.tometal.com/
PLAGUE RIDER:
https://www.facebook.com/PlagueRiderUK