ALBUM REVIEW: Echoes Of The Devil’s Den – Terminal Nation
If TERMINAL NATION were already bloody furious in 2020, how mad do you think they are gonna be now? Four years after their outstanding debut full-length Holocene Extinction – the gap plugged best of all by a killer split with KRUELTY as well as a couple of other singles and a live tape – Echoes Of The Devil’s Den has the answer. It’s the furthest into pure death metal they’ve ventured thus far, their roots in hardcore and grind and so on still present but perhaps a little more subtle in what is ultimately an absolute monster of a record that steamrolls all who stand in the Arkansas outfit’s way – and then reverses back over them just to be sure.
Those familiar with the band’s previous efforts – or even just a working understanding of the current state of the world – should not be surprised by their chosen targets, nor indeed by the lack of prisoners taken. Fourth track No Reform (New Age Slave Patrol) minces even fewer words than most, its blunt force hook of “Fuck every (fucking) cop that’s ever fucking lived” without question as pile-on-inducing and immediately memorable as this album gets at any point. Elsewhere, recent single Merchants Of Bloodshed – on which there will be more to say later – takes aim as expected at those who profit from the horrors of war, while one imagines that Dwid Hellion of INTEGRITY needed little convincing to lend his deranged and yowling vocals to closer Release The Serpents’ venomous rebuke of religion.
But it’s not just what they have to say that makes TERMINAL NATION special; even in purely musical terms they are a genuinely brilliant death metal band and here they have produced a genuinely brilliant death metal record. Echoes Of The Devil’s Den majors most of all on laying out a hefty mid-tempo bludgeoning, its sledgehammer grooves and wrecking ball breakdowns making for a fierce and fiery competitor to that fantastic FROZEN SOUL record from last year, and of course a worthy descendent of the legendary BOLT THROWER to whom all these bands owe so much. Credit must also go to producer Ryan Bram (CREEPING DEATH, GATECREEPER, SEX PRISONER) for his efforts here, his thick and suffocating mix exactly what an album like this needs to ensure that every blow lands with full force.
It sustains itself really well across 40 minutes too, the instrumental interlude of Embers Of Humanity and the subsequent ascent to towering heavy metal metal via the soaring clean vocals of Jesse Leach of KILLSWITCH ENGAGE on the aforementioned Merchants Of Bloodshed particularly well-placed at the heart of the record to ensure that it does not become an exercise in punishment alone. This in turn enables later tracks like Dying Alive and Cemetery Of Imposters to hit just as hard as anything in the album’s first half, the latter elevated especially as K. Kennedy of SEX PRISONER joins the band’s own Stan Liszewski in delivering the gloriously OTT “I will bury you” – *shotgun click* *sub drop* – “in the fucking ground” atop a breakdown that seems intent on making those words a reality.
Ultimately it is almost impossible to cover every stand-out moment here – the guest spots from Todd Jones of NAILS and Zak Vargas of ELYSIA on Written By The Victor and The Spikes Under The Bridge respectively, the suitably doomy heft of Empire In Decay, the simply gargantuan Bullet For A Stone… the only conclusion left to draw is that Echoes Of The Devil’s Den is an album without an ounce of weakness or filler, a modern death metal essential that stands even more confidently than its predecessor among the very best markers of a truly thriving time for the genre.
Rating: 9/10
Echoes Of The Devil’s Den is set for release on May 3rd via 20 Buck Spin.
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