(Death Metal) [CD] Birth Asphyxia - Human Obelisk - 2012, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Music genre labels. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are actually pretty useful. Go to youtube, type in ‘Death Metal’ and that’s what you get a shit ton of. It’s up to you to then sort the wheat from the shitty, shitty chaff. I don’t buy in to the whole ‘it’s all just heavy metal’ bullshit. C’mon. Even my grandmother can tell the difference between Thrash, Death and Black metal and she’s dead. Death metal? Totally sums up the music. Punishing, unpleasant blasts of heavy as fuck chaos.
Maybe I’m just getting old but it seemed easier when I was young….. -er. There was heavy metal and its off-shoots i.e. death, doom, thrash, black, grindcore etc. But nowadays you’ve got offshoots of the the off-shoot’s off-shoots (took me a second or two to figure out where to put the apostrophe). Metalcore, deathcore, progressive technical death. Even fucking crabcore! What the fuck is crabcore? That’s rhetorical. I don’t actually give a shit.
Anyway, I mention this because of the dressing down I got for mistaking brutal death metal for death metal. There is a difference apparently. What? DM is, in general, fucking brutal. Stupid kids and your sub-genre’s. If I wasn’t on a zimmer frame I’d kick your asses so hard I’d spend this cold Japanese winter wearing warm socks of dried shit.
So we come to Birth Asphyxia who may be death metal (according to the CD sticker) or brutal death metal (so says the record company). I get the impression they don’t really give a shit and are just getting on with writing Suffocation style death up in Niigata. It’s very brutal death metal either way you cut it. Wait. Can I say that now? Shit. I am getting old. My hair is definitely thinner and it’s much harder for me to keep a youthful figure. That may just be beer though. I feel like singing Kiss’ ‘Blind’. Give me a minute.
Anyway Birth Asphyxia look pretty young yet they have still managed to vomit forth a a particularly heavy first album here. They also manage to throw out a lot of riffs without making it seem like they are just throwing out a lot of riffs. I.e. there is riff cohesion despite the tempo changes from slow to mid to fast to skull fucked by Rocco Sifredi.
The singer is one of my favourite types of singer, female and attractive. If I hadn’t told you you would not realize this fact. Hal’s voice is incredibly brutal. Kind of like Som (ex-Cerebral Bore) she loses all trace of femininity and becomes more of a beast belting forth blasts of inhuman vocal hostility that must of had her parents phoning up the local exorcist during her bedroom practice days.
The song names are in English so I’ll make the assumption that the lyrics are as well but without a lyric sheet Hal could be singing in outer Mongolian and I would be none the wiser. Fuck it. The voice is just another instrument that adds to the overall brutality of proceedings. You don’t need to know what she’s saying (would be nice though) as long as you can feel her rage.
The riffs are most definitely here in abundance, too. This is total Suffocation territory. Shame on you if you think that is a bad thing. It’s not. The speed rarely lets up which adds to the smashing of the faces and the banging of the heads. Plus, the recording occasionally peaks which adds a really nice ‘live’ feel to the whole thing.
Nice cover by Par Olofsson, cover artist of Immolation’s ‘Majesty And Decay’ and the fucking awesome cover for The Faceless’ ‘Planetary Duality’ (a fucking crushing album as well). It’s one of those covers where you look at it and wonder how long you would survive if it became reality and you were trapped there. There are no beasts etc. But it looks pointy and hostile. I used to be freaked out by the cover to Iron Maiden’s ‘Killers’. I used to imagine hiding in the supermarket behind Eddie.Who knows if he is good or bad?
So this is a fucking good album. It’s on Bloodcurdling Enterprises, a Japanese based label specializing in Brutal Death Metal. What? No death metal? Waka waka waka!
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Yoko Yokoyama - Bass
Ryousuke Abe - Drums
Tatsuya Okamura - Guitars
HAL - Vocals