(written by Islander)
“The Montreal band Serpent Corpse named themselves for a dead thing, and their brand of death metal does channel the stench of rot and ruin. But the great serpent brandished in their name still lives, a monstrous presence that will not be subdued, but finds an ally in death.”
That’s how we began introducing our last song premiere for Serpent Corpse two years ago, which helped pave the way for their debut album Blood Sabbath. And now we have the fiendish pleasure of premiering another Serpent Corpse song, this one from their new EP Retaliate, which will see release on June 27th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
That debut album was an undeniably hellish affair, but hellish in more ways than one. As we wrote back then, the album “isn’t just rotten to the core but also massively bludgeoning, chillingly supernatural, and maniacally vicious. The music seeps into the bloodstream like a fatal poison, disembowels with ravenous cruelty, and feeds on what it has spilled with ghastly relish.”
The new EP is also multi-faceted. While thrashing death metal can still be seen as the band’s radioactive backbone, they’ve embellished their new songs in an adventurous variety of ways.
The song we’re premiering today, “Meteor Summon“, is perhaps the best example of how far these serpents have ranged on the new EP. Your first clue of that is in the song’s length — it tops 9 minutes, and the band haven’t wasted any of them.
They serve up feeding swarms of grisly tremolo’d riffage and gut-busting bass throbs, coupled with bone-bruising drums and rabid snarls. They break out eerie chords and swirling, spectral leads, and they cause the music to dismally moan and wretchedly wail.
They inflict moments of brazen imperiousness and wild delirium, coupled with booming cannonades and heaving stomps. They slow and stagger, creating phases of sonic hallucination. They let the bass nimbly bounce but shroud it in ghostly ambient tones.
They double-down on their audio portraits of supernatural hauntings with ethereally shimmering decibels and they wake up our reptile brains with a big tribal drum progression. They quickly chug, manifesting vicious menace, setting up a piercing guitar solo that sounds like the beckoning of a wraith in agony.
As the end approaches, the layered guitars create channel-shifting sensations that are even more supernatural and bereft, even as the rhythm section work on your neck and spine with compulsively muscle-moving consequences. The music saturates the mind in the grievously chilling atmosphere it has been creating, finally fading away through the sounds of mournful strings.
And so, to go back to where we started, this song proves to be an expansion of Serpent Column‘s creative impulses, or at least a strengthening of their progressive and atmospheric tendencies, without moderating their death-dealing savagery.
SERPENT CORPSE is:
Adam Breault – Guitar
Andrew Haddad – Vocals & Bass
Christian Lacroix – Guitar
Zachariah Su – Drums
Retaliate is adorned with cover artwork by Lucas Korte (Shoggoth Kinetics). As usual, Transcending Obscurity will release it in many formats — vinyl LP, CD, and digital — along with an extravagant array of apparel and other merchandise.
Check the links below for more details, and also check out the stream of the first song revealed from the EP — “Iron Corpse“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://serpentcorpse-label.bandcamp.com/album/retaliate
http://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
http://eu.tometal.com/
SERPENT CORPSE:
http://instagram.com/serpent_corpse