Accursed Spawn - The Virulent Host

Fuck Dow Chemical forever

These Canadian gore-freaks have been alive and kicking in some form for about ten years now, but only just now have they finally managed to get a full length out.  They kinda flew under my radar during their demo stage, but now that The Virulent Host has found its way to my speakers, I can say with confidence that they won't be doing that any more, and with any luck the rest of the scene at large will perk up and take notice as well, because this, put lightly, kicks fucking ass.

To just get right to the point, because I have no lengthy preamble for once, Accursed Spawn brings nothing new to the table, but what they do bring is classic, explosive, and destructive death metal.  Despite invoking the souls of many of the classics from the early 90s, The Virulent Host doesn't fall into the currently popular trapping of simply retreading that old ground.  No, they take the basics of American classics like Deicide and (especially) Cannibal Corpse and give them a modern tech death-y sheen.  Because of this they fall in between two prominent camps nowadays.  Between the bands who shamelessly worship old bands in an attempt to redo what was done already on a surface level and the camp of new bands trying to further evolve the style via cavernous atmosphere or Demilich-y weirdness, we have a band like Accursed Spawn, who instead delve a bit deeper beyond the surface aesthetics and clearly truly understand what made classic death metal so good in the first place, and then just does it a second time but faster and meaner.  I think I could safely call this tech death, but the technicality is pretty understated.  This is more the Cannibal Corpse school of technicality, where oodles of neoclassical flourish and endless spinning basslines are eschewed in favor of rhythmic density and the sheer speed of the many ideas contained within each song, interspersed masterfully with punishing savagery.  It can be hard to pinpoint exact moments in songs for this reason, but I think the overwhelming deluge of riffery works to the album's advantage.  There are blistering drum fills, solos that make your eyes whirl like a slot machine reel, and basslines that spend a surprising amount of time exploring the fretboard like a coked up tarantula, but just like my heroes in Cannibal, none of them ever truly drown the rest of the band out to take center stage.  They're one well oiled machine, an effective unit of hellsoaked barbarism that just rips everything to shreds.

There seems to be a weird thing going on with the album where the odd numbered songs are all the best ones, but they're all so consistently excellent that it doesn't really matter in the long run.  "Bhopal '84" and "Shotgun Facelift" may have some more overtly energetic and high flying moments than "Bloodforged" or "The Ageless Curse" but the dip in quality is so slight that it might as well not exist.  The thing about The Virulent Host that I think makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the faceless blasticity of the current DM scene is how well they implement their crushing grooves.  The aforementioned "Shotgun Facelift" has an absolutely fucking brutal bridge section leading into the harmonized solo that just wrecks my god damned neck.  There are moments like that all over the place, they're less overt than something like Autopsy but they do their job incredibly well.  The point is that this isn't just a blur of zippy technicality, it's instead a bludgeoning that changes its angle of attack so frequently that you can't effectively get your guard up.  The world needs more of this type of utter ferocity, and as a result it's one of the few releases so far to have a real shot at ranking highly on my year end list.  Don't pass this sucker up.


RATING: 90%