(Today is the day when Dark Descent Records releases the second album by the death metal band Castrator, and to help spotlight the event we present DGR‘s review and a full stream of the album.)
Sometimes, you just have an extrasensory idea that an album is going to be one you’re going to enjoy. It’s not enough to launch your own late night hotline to allow people to speak to dead relatives but wow, does it feel close to it. The combination of artwork, genre, musicianship involved if you’re extra nerdy like us around here, and sometimes even the cover song in the tracklisting manage to align the planets just right and you just know that this is one you’ll like.
Listening to such an album then becomes an exercise in watching a detonation cord burn. The lead up to the final explosion is exciting but it’s a tense exercise watching it burn down when you’re waiting ever so intently for that moment when the album catches fire for you and becomes one that you lock in with. In the case of Castrator and their new album Coronation Of The Grotesque, thankfully that wait is not tremendously long. In fact, a rough estimate would place that initial explosion around song two, and if not then, by song four, and if not then there’s a pretty good one at song six and if not… well you can guess how this is going to go.
Photos credit: Ashley Taylor
Coronation of The Grotesque is Castrator’s second album, following the series of their No Victim demo and EP and 2022’s Defiled In Oblivion. We did in fact touch on that first full-length way back in September of that same year in this review about three months after its release and found the band to be pretty solid and obviously well versed in their genre. The crew behind Castrator have a history in death metal and their combined forces on that debut album proved it.
Knowing this, it was easy to guess that Castrator would likely leap over the sophomore curse pretty easily because for the most part the group’s lineup – save for the new addition of The Breathing Process guitarist Sara Loerlein to the roster – has remained intact for Coronation Of The Grotesque. Plenty can be said for the stability of a lineup for a new album, because if nothing else you can hear how they have gelled in between releases. Sometimes that can lead to huge, evolutionary leaps in musical style between releases, or in the case of Coronation Of The Grotesque that can lead something that can be described as faster, hungrier, and meaner than Castrator were before.
Defiled In Oblivion was a pretty fucking heavy album to start with, so when a follow-up release rears its head around the corner with the philosophy of “double down on everything” you can guess how things go. Coronation Of The Grotesque starts off relentless with “Fragments Of Defiance” and never lets up from there. It introduces us to one of three modes for Castrator — the bludgeoning, the blinding, and the blisteringly fast. “Fragments Of Defiance” is in the camp of the bludgeoning death metal block and is driven by a combination of gore-soaked guitar riffwork and drumming that makes caveman descriptors look wimpy. It sounds as if it was written to be played with 2×4’s in mind, not drum sticks.
“Fragments Of Defiance” is also surgically precise with its time, demonstrating a ruthless efficiency that packs a ton of brutality into three and four minutes time and time again across the whole album. There’s nothing that feels indulgent on this release and there’s rarely anything scene-setting-wise for atmosphere. Castrator launch every song with the cards laid out on the table as to what style of death metal they are and then proceed to light them on fire.
Which is why songs like “I Am Eunuch”, “Mortem Opeterie”, and “Deviant Miscreant” are as effective as they are when they appear. When we speak of buzzsaws and hellfire riffwork in death metal songs, the pathways that Castrator guide us down during the opening of these songs are the best definitions of those moments. They’ve provided listeners with a map to the language in the opening moments of each of those songs. Guitar parts and rhythm section just peel out from the start, like a car launching from the starting line as a drag race, leaving marks along the entirety of the ground it travels. It is a glorious throwback to unleash a rhythm section and a vocalist into the ride-into-armageddon-esque gallop those songs launch into, and every time a peeling guitar solo screeches into existence like a bird coming in for the kill you can’t help but get excited.
This is an absolutely well-known playbook but each of those songs is executed so well that you can sense the venom dripping from the band’s fangs as each section is set off in this particular pyrotechnic showcase. Yes, they’re thrashier numbers as far as death metal is concerned but it also helps explain how a cover of Exodus’ “Metal Command” has placed itself as a closer of the album. Perhaps Castrator found themselves drawn to the circle-pit whirling magicks of a good thrash riff or perhaps they liked the idea of offering up a tribute to the altar of metal’s icons to close out their sophomore release the same way they closed out Defiled In Oblivion with the cover of Venom’s “Countess Bathory”. Either way, we as listeners are the beneficiary because Castrator are near unstoppable when they lean heavy on the gas pedal.
Deep in the recesses of Coronation Of The Grotesque does lie a particular neck-snapper in the form of “Blood Bind’s Curse”. Arriving after the utter hammering that is “Psalm Of The Beguiled”, “Blood Bind’s Curse” is lithe, with twisting bass-lines that become more and more prominent as the band drag us deeper into the caverns of the album. Through each successive display of brutality and torch-lit guidance through old school resurrected into modern day, Castrator crank the wheel of the torture rack ever tighter. After the many battle-ridden gallops and martial beatings that the first six tracks offer up, Castrator spend the last handful twisting and turning their own formula into knots, and who would we be if not complete suckers for any time we get to hear the higher end of a bass guitar reaching out from the abyss to grab its fair share of spirits to pull backwards into the dark?
“Blood Bind’s Curse” is framed around this idea, a little slower than the white-knuckled rushes before them but sharing a lot of DNA with earlier songs like “Covenant Of Deceit”. It’s probably not in the band’s mission statement to continually cycle back around to earlier ideas but again, Coronation Of The Grotesque seems mainly concerned with the administration of violence, artistic aspirations can go pound sand.
It is exciting to hear when a band becomes a force to be reckoned with. Castrator had already shown that on their first few releases, and Coronation Of The Grotesque goes far in cementing that fact. Castrator are putting a career in death metal to good use here, bringing forth old spirits and twisting them into new forms for their own malicious purposes. Castrator make evident their taste for old-school and thrash on their second full-length and they do so without any of it devolving into pure influence worship. Their own take on the genre is one so titanically heavy already that the band have bought themselves more than enough room to create an album wherein half the tracklisting would spin up a human whirlpool at a memorial service.
Coronation Of The Grotesque doesn’t break hard from the tried and true genre-facets of death metal as a whole so there is a clear sense of familiarity and shared language interwoven throughout this release, but it does do a really fucking good job of breaking necks in the process.
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