(written by Islander)
As you can see, the cover art created by Brvja XIII for Demonic Manifestation’s new album Grimshrine is a cornucopia of horrors. It seizes attention and maintains it as the viewer more carefully inspects each of its hideous visions.
The album is also a musical cornucopia of horrors that turns out to be just as absorbing as the cover art. The music is massive, mauling, and maniacal, but the band’s impressively dynamic songwriting leads them to reveal other ghastly (and haunting dimensions) — as you will vividly experience for yourselves through our premiere of the album’s second advance track, “Host“.
Grimshrine is this Mexican band’s third album in a career that began in 2012 and has drawn inspiration from such classic Swedish death metal bands as Dismember, Grave, Entombed, Unleashed, and Crematory. It will be released on September 4th by Personal Records.
Grimshrine follows the band’s last album by nearly nine years, with only a 2020 split release in between, and in the meantime the lineup has condensed into a power trio. But if anything, the elapsed years have added high-octane fuel to the band’s deathly ravaging power and enhanced their songwriting prowess, while doing nothing to diminish their devotion to the magic of early Swedeath.
Which leads his to “Host“:
On this new song Demonic Manifestation waste no time charging through listeners like the attack of a hellish tank battalion. With skull-snapping beats driving the pace, the ravenously writhing riffage discharges the beloved chainsawing corrosiveness of rotten old-school Swedish death metal while a convulsing lead-guitar channels frenzied madness and the bass heavily undulates from crushing cavernous depths.
The vocals match the madness and ravening savagery of the music as they expel the lyrics in abyssal roars that seamlessly escalate into horrifying howls, while ecstatically screaming guitar solos create the song’s most explosively maniacal moments.
Yet the song reveals other dimensions as well. Near its mid-point the band briefly quell the crushing to make room for a devilish (and eerily ringing) guitar instrumental. When the crushing resumes, the pace is slower than before the break. The bass pounds like an enormous sledgehammer; the chainsaw riffing generates a malignant pulse; the vocals vent screams and growls that seem to extend beyond the limits of human endurance.
The lead guitar takes over again as the song approaches its end, but this time (as the rhythm guitar heavily groans), its slowly swirling melody is both mesmerizing and sorrowful, a sonic spellcasting that’s very hard to forget.
So, to sum up: “Host” is a viciously mauling and viscerally pulse-pounding horror-show with a tremendously monstrous vocal performance, and if that were all the song offered it would still cause salivation among fans of old-school Swedish death metal, but it’s the track’s closing guitar melody (a hybrid of sorcery and suffering) that really elevates it and gives it the ring of a classic.
DEMONIC MANIFESTATION is:
Victor Mercado — vocals / rhythm guitar
Enrique Martínez — guitar / lead guitar / bass
Felipe González — drums
Personal Records will release Grimshrine on CD and digital formats, and it’s available for pre-order now via the links below.
We’re also sharing an eye-popping lyric video for the first song revealed from the album, “Kuru: The Laughing Death March“. On the one hand it’s a hell-for-leather attack and also a neck-wrecking chug-fest of a very high order, but, like the song we’ve just premiered, it also includes its own momentum-changing and mood-changing twists and turns.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.personal-records.com/product/pre-order-demonic-manifestation-cd/
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/grimshrine
DEMONIC MANIFESTATION:
https://demonicmanifestation.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Demonicmanifestation
https://www.instagram.com/demonic_manifestation_official