(This is a guest review of a new EP by the veteran Mexican band Mortuary (released last month by HPGD Productions) written by Jason Kiss, also known as Lonegoat from Goatcraft and Lord Abyss from Amorphophallus Titanum.)
As I have grown older, my patience for speed metal has waned substantially. Nevertheless, I continue to hold an affinity for proto-death metal expressions in which speed metal is driven beyond the confines of its own limited logic and, through excess, transforms into something altogether more menacing and expansive.
One might argue that Morbid Angel on Abominations of Desolation, alongside Necrovore’s Divus de Mortuus and Possessed’s Seven Churches, were among the first to exemplify this rupture; they produced the conditions for death metal to emerge as its own original coterie unshackled to its speed metal roots. What compels me not is speed metal in itself, but rather this fractured threshold where the spirit of extremity in metal is nourished and an Aristotelian potentiality is actualized; where speed metal dies so that something more sinister can take its place.