(written by Islander)
If you heard the Bringers of Disease debut EP Gospel Of Pestilence it’s unlikely you’ve easily forgotten the experience, even though it was released 15 years ago. But maybe you never came across it. In that case, what should quickly seize your attention for the band’s debut album Sulphur are the people who made it.
The lineup includes founding guitarist Jason Phillips (ex-Acheron) and original vocalist Logan Madison alongside Jeff Wilson (Chrome Waves, ex-Nachtmystium, ex-Wolvhammer), drummer Zack Simmons (Goatwhore, Acid Bath), and bassist Jon Woodring (ex-Usurper, Bones).
On top of that, the album also features guest guitars on “First Born Of The Dead” by Nate Garnett (Skeletonwitch) and on “Flowers Bloom From The Prophet’s Skull” by Sonny Reinhardt (Necrot), and guest vocals on “Sacred Heart Of The Abyss” by Ben Falgoust (Goatwhore, Soilent Green).
Now that we have your attention with that information — which is probably all the inducement any lover of metallic extremity really needs to dive into Sulphur — we’ll present a full stream of the album, on the eve of its release by Disorder Recordings. But in the extremely unlikely event that someone wants to know more before spending time with the album, here’s more.
That four-song EP Gospel of Pestilence was, to use an overworked but entirely appropriate word, vicious. The music included earth-shaking rhythms, riffing that seared and soared, and serrated-edge howls that were merciless and maniacal enough to guard the gates of Hell by special appointment of the Dark Lord.
It hit hard enough to splinter bone but the riffing also created truly chilling atmospherics — moods that were diseased, dismal, deranged, and, most of all, not earthly, including frightening visions of hellish anti-cosmic grandeur. It also included tremendous bass-work and electrifying drum progressions, both of them displaying more nuance and dynamism (and prog-metal inclinations) than what’s usually found in such mauling and mind-broiling intersections of black and death metal.
The songs also included unexpected musical digressions that used different techniques for putting a deeper chill across our flesh (“Our Final Reward In Hell” being a prime example of that).
These are among the reasons why we suspect that EP has lingered in the heads of people who heard it despite the passing of so much time, and it has held up extremely well from then to now — which you can confirm for yourselves by going here. It’s likely that the new album will linger too.
In some ways it’s as if Bringers of Disease picked right up where they left off despite the elapse of years and the changes in lineup mentioned above, but the music is even more multi-faceted and mood-moving than before, a doubling-down on the atmospheric elements of their sound, if you will.
These seven songs (which collectively add up to about half an hour of music) are still vicious, still dangerous to a listener’s skeletal integrity, but they bring to the table even more instrumental nuance and even more powerfully evocative melodies — melodic invocations of infernal menace, stultifying misery, haunting eeriness, and towering black-shrouded grandeur.
The tremolo-fueled riffing (and probably synths as well?) still often sounds vast, often flowing like glittering but sulfurous waves as it channels those harrowing and chilling moods, but the band also inject sensations of feverish, jolting cruelty as well as wailing guitar-leads that sound ethereal and apparitional, yet also seem to convulse in shrill agonies.
Nate Garnett’s contributions on the guitar front, btw, help make the heart-breaking “First Born of the Dead” one of the album’s standout tracks, while Sonny Reinhardt’s guest guitar appearance on the mostly mid-paced and mournful “Flowers Bloom From the Prophet’s Skull” sounds like a soulful ghost when it appears, just as the song starts jolting necks into motion.
The band’s rhythm section may have changed, but they obviously know what they’re doing, and what they do is not only to beat listeners to a pulp but also to continually shift tempos and patterns, rocking and stalking and adventuring. In other words, this isn’t a typical blast-fest by any stretch, any more than that old EP was.
As for the reverb-accented vocals (which are sometimes doubled), they sound, if anything, even more unhinged than 15 years ago when they expel throat-shredding screams, but they also howl and roar like some hybrid of Cerberus and Leviathan. In “First Born of the Dead” they also briefly transform into gritty, abyssal, near-spoken words, and (as noted above) Ben Falgoust vocally joins in on the utterly furious but also muscle-moving “Sacred Heart of the Abyss” in a way that makes it even more diabolically scary.
The album’s title song adds a further degree of variety to the experience, providing an entirely ambient piece of music that’s panoramic, melancholy, and (of course) otherworldly; it also includes some dim and distorted muttering that only barely sounds human.
At the end, with “March of the Burning Tower“, Bringers of Disease create a truly apocalyptic experience, the kind of world-ender that doesn’t manifest scouring violence but instead (as the name signifies) a powerful and towering black march into endless agony and globe-spanning desolation. The wailing guitar leads and doubled screams there are soul-shattering, and nothing else about the song reveals any light of hope at the end of the terrible road either.
In short, Sulphur is a tremendously good album and a very memorable one. Given the talent in the lineup, that’s not shocking, but it’s very nice to see just how much thought they put into these new songs, which take Bringers of Disease to a new level of allure. We’ll now leave you with these comments from two of those talents:
Jeff Wilson: “What a wild trip it’s been…. After not being involved in the project for over 10 years, I was surprised at how easily this one initially came together. Looking forward to starting the next.”
Jason Phillips: “If I was going to revive the beast known as Bringers of Disease, I wasn’t going to half ass it. I believe this is one of the most potent line ups out there, and Sulphur is a testament to that.”
Sulphur was engineered by the band, mixed and mastered by Jeff Wilson, and completed with cover art by Rio Oka and layout by Jeff Wilson. Sulphur will be released on April 24th, on LP and digitally via Disorder Recordings. So Below Productions will also be releasing a cassette version. Pre-orders are available now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://bringersofdiseaseoh.bandcamp.com/album/sulphur
https://sobelowproductions.bandcamp.com/
BRINGERS OF DISEASE:
https://www.facebook.com/BringersOfDisease
https://bringersofdiseaseoh.bandcamp.com
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