They may be a smidgeon of bias that often creeps in when an album that’s up before the beak, hails from our own fair island of green and pleasant land and whilst it would be appropriation on a humungous scale to even mention the name of William Blake in an album review of UK extreme metal, it’s often heartening from a scene longevity perspective, to have the honour of listening to a ‘home grown’ band that have been on the peripheries of the scene of late and have been commandeering positive and often hyperbolic praise. As previously mentioned, that often gets my bum hole whistling Dixie, as the vanguard of praise, hype and genuflection, is often (but not always) let down by the accompanying music.
And so, with sphincter puckered, to this, the debut album from the home of Sisyphus’s eternal game of roundabout roulette Milton Keynes, Casket Feeder. Having only had the one EP to their name this is a hugely competent collection of songs for a such a shortly tenured band. First thing to note, is that this sounds fucking huge. Maybe it’s because I am an old fart (forty-eight this year age fans), and when I was playing the shit hole toilet circuit with my old band in the smelliest corners of a Camden, sound both live and on record, was a tenuous coalescence of luck, lack of skill and whether you’ve managed to buy the sound engineer enough snakebite and black and speed. Certainly, it continually astounds me how modern albums sound so bloody good and what must be shoestring budgets, and ‘Servants of Violence’ is certainly within that bracket of amazingly sounding albums. The guitars buzzsaw and grind, the vocals pop and sonic boom their way throughout the album and the drums are warm, punchy and surgically sharp as each cymbal and snare hit, slice through your ear drums with precision. So, it sounds great, but what of the songs? Whilst not exactly re-inventing the wheel in terms of its genre affiliations and affectations being as it is, a heady cocktail of death and black metal platitudes served on a bed of hardcore sensibilities, there is more than enough song writing nous and nuance on display here to wash away any criticisms relating to a lack of originality. Servants of Violence might not be ‘wholly’ original but that doesn’t really matter. Yes, the whole album sounds vaguely familiar but, what Casket Feder have done on this album, has been to build on this genre of music (that is especially prevalent in the current UK death metal scene as we speak) and added enough of themselves into the album’s DNA, to elevate this album above the merely acceptable, to exist on a higher plane which translates to be a punishing, exhilarating and enjoyable musical journey.
It has moments of pure old school UK thrash to it (think Sabbat in their pomp), which are segued into via brutal hardcore slug fests via shots of death metal Entombed style riffery. The vocals, certainly on the low-end growling scale, are deep and monstrous which then pivot into a higher register that provide the perfect complement to the ensuing metallic fury, non-more so than on ‘Sentenced To Death’ and album opener ‘To The Hounds Go The Faithful’ which slow the tempo down as the guitars chug away like Scott Ian playing Down covers. Having listened to this album a few times now, the band seemed to be waging an internal war between themselves in terms of the predominant musical direction with the album pushing a pulling between the blast beats and one hundred miles an hour riffing (with some lovely pinched harmonics that Pantera would be proud of) that encompass their death/black metal roots whilst fighting for air like a drowning badger are the more hardcore elements which are less prevalent overall, but provide a welcome and delicious respite from the speedier elements at work here. On balance, Casket Feeder have created a hugely enjoyable and competent debut album which is pleasing, not just from a UK scene perspective, but also, in general, this is just a decent collection of songs that snarl, groove, thrash, pummel and generally kick ass. As Alan Partridge might say…. ‘Lovely stuff’.
(8/10 Nick Griffiths)
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