There’s Carcass worship aplenty here though, with waves of grinding riffs, old school guitar tones, a rhythm section that gives the whole thing a little headbanging groove, and filth laden vocals that wash over you like used formaldehyde.
Will make what I predict to be an unprecedented play garnering the praise of thrashers far and wide.
Neocaesar take said death metal and ramp it up to pure malicious levels of brilliance that simply ignore your definitions of what old school or new school are.
If Melodeath is your thing, you’d be an idiot to miss this. But be prepared, because this leans more to the nastier than the nice.
Purtenance provide a clinic on meat and potatoes death metal.
Gravesite, with their much more nuanced approach are maybe more comparable to a lich from Dungeons and Dragons fame. These creatures were evil sorcerers who extended their life even past death, basically intelligent, malevolent, animated corpses with great power.
Clearly, the old school Bay area thrash sound is not played out though, as the band uses waves of well placed riffs to makes an older sound seem both current and traditional.
The band combines elements of Stockholm death metal with grindcore to create a stew of nastiness from which I can’t help but repeatedly partake.
Sometimes bands that so clearly worship another time and place in musical history end up as pale shadows of their idols. Not so with The Wizards. They hold there own. Full Moon in Scorpio blew me away right from the opening riffs.
While the music is often quite beautiful, it never feels quite safe. There remains an ominous air to it, which is a tough combination to pull off.