ALBUM REVIEW: Season Of Evil – Wasted Death
Sludge! Thrash! Grind! D-beat! Zombies!?? The debut album from London trio WASTED DEATH caters to just about anyone with a taste for the sick and twisted and fast and furious. It’s called Season Of Evil and is even accompanied by a gloriously schlocky mini-movie directed by drummer Tom Brewins in which the band fight off a horde of vomiting undead, though if you don’t fancy seeing a man pulling his own face apart or a woman getting her arm cut off by a cymbal you will still find plenty of violent thrills in the listening experience alone.
While the film and the artwork and even the sample from Ghostbusters II that opens the record all point to an element of tongue in cheek, the music here is no joke. Season Of Evil deals in ragers upon ragers, the band absolutely careening through a relentless opening run of T-Virus into Wirehead into Brain All Rot into Dogs On Hind Legs. Wirehead in particular highlights a noisier influence – which makes sense given that Brewins also drums in USA NAILS and guitarist Wayne Adams plays in BIG LAD and PETBRICK – and added to all the other nasty stuff in the mix the final product here and indeed throughout a lot of the record ends up drawing quite flattering comparisons to CONVERGE at their most feral and thrashy, which, of course, can only ever be a good thing.
Fifth track Selfish Enough To Suck Air is perfectly placed right in the middle of the madness, its lumbering heft mixing things up just as the album might have otherwise started to run away from its listeners, while lead single Stratofortess that follows it sees vocalist/bassist Charlie Davis take aim at “war-mongering dog-whistlers” with the support of some truly massive riffs that fully live up to the press notes’ references to SEPULTURA and the legendary NOLA scene. Together these prove to be two of the album’s most immediately memorable offerings, if only because they don’t absolutely tear by like most of the others, as does the savage closer Wasted Death By Wasted Death – a total thrash-fest capped off by a ripping solo from Scott Black of GREEN LUNG.
Really though Season Of Evil is all killer; it doesn’t hang about in the slightest but there’s also enough going on to keep stomachs churning and knuckles whitening from breathless start to bludgeoning finish. The 25-minute runtime is spot on, as is Adams’ production – all gritty and grimy and bristling but never to the detriment of the force with which the music is delivered – and it may sound a bit like CONVERGE or any number of other great bands at any given moment but that is hardly a reason to complain and regardless such influences all come together to leave listeners with a solid impression of a world of WASTED DEATH’s own demented making.
Rating: 8/10
Season Of Evil is set for release on March 15th via APF Records.
Follow WASTED DEATH on Bandcamp.