(Andy Synn turns his attention today to the recently-released new album from New Jersey’s Replicant)
There’s a hoary old cliche – perhaps you’ve heard it – that “good artists borrow, great artists steal”.
And Replicant‘s new album is a prime example of this.
Insanity reigns supreme in the Replicant song you’re about to hear, like a mad god gone berserk. It has the impact of a live power line thrashing unsuspecting pedestrians in a deluge, while teleporting their brains into a whipping centrifuge. Minds will be boggled, bones will be broken, blood spray will paint the walls.
Now that we have your attention, let’s fill in a bit of the back-story. Continue reading »
New Jersey’s Replicant seized attention with their 2018 debut album Negative Life, which Steve Schwegler (of Pyrrhon, Seputus, and Weeping Sores) beautifully reviewed for us. A couple of impressive splits followed that, along with an EP named Hypochondria of the Machine (reviewed here) that further marked Replicant as a truly distinctive band worth watching very closely.
Yet as attention-grabbing as all those releases were, they still might not have prepared listeners for the wild and often weird extravaganzas encompassed by the band’s forthcoming second full-length, Malignant Reality (set for release by Transcending Obscurity on September 10th). The music is wonderfully head-spinning (as well as savage), and there’s probably not a better example of just how head-spinning it can become than the song we’re premiering today — “Chassis of Deceit“. Continue reading »
Contrary to an accusation that one of my NCS comrades recently leveled at another one, I don’t hate fun. In fact, I love it, and I enjoy seeing other people have fun. And so, although the imminent Christmas holiday means nothing to me, I’m sure I speak for all of us here (except maybe one of us) in wishing you some joy.
To ameliorate the possibility that you will have nothing in your stocking but a lump of coal because you’ve been so baaaad, and to help relieve the brain death that the stresses of the holiday season demonstrably produce, here are a few gifts from us to you.
REPLICANT
This New Jersey death metal band turned out a hell of a debut album in 2018’s Negative Life, which Steve Schwegler (of Pyrrhon, Seputus, and Weeping Sores) beauatifully reviewed for us. I’ll excerpt just a few of his thoughts about that album: Continue reading »
(We present a guest review of the new album by New Jersey’s Replicant, written by Stephen Matthew Schwegler, a member of Pyrrhon, Seputus, and Weeping Sores.)
Being a songwriter in a vastly under-appreciated but densely populated genre, the importance of a strong identity seems, to me, paramount. To be fair, I am biased in the case of the band Replicant. I love single-word band monikers. I love brutal and atonal slamming death metal. I love Pete/Mike/Matty as individuals, and my band has played shows with them numerous times now.
That being said, the creature that is Replicant inhabits a long-missed niche in death metal for me. Concise and elegant, their simplistic namesake tells you everything you need to know about the band before ever hearing the music. Continue reading »