Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the second edition of Extreme Of The Extreme. This is a column used to display some of the great, lesser known extreme metal bands that may go undetected by the casual metal fan. That means black, death, thrash, grind, and so forth. Before moving onto the main course though, you can check out the first edition (or if you're in the future, other editions) here.
Hailing out of Seattle, Washington, Xoth are prepared to drop their new album, Interdimensional Invocations. This is a band that uses their unique blending of harmonies more closely related to thrash, with the raw aggression of death metal. That is the easiest way to describe how the second album from Xoth forms. Previously, the band have shown off two tracks, "Casting The Sigil" and "Back To The Jungle". Straddled between these two songs though, is "Mountain Machines".
"Mountain Machines" has enough groove and riffs in it to fill out this entire album. Still though, none of it feels under-appreciated in this track. The main verse riff even feels like something reminiscent out of a video game, old school Sonic or F-Zero. It's fast and an absolute assault on the listener. It only adds to it's strength when Tyler Splurgis (guitar) and Woody Adler (guitar) start harmonizing on the riff.
A third song that Xoth has sort of shown off is "Plague Revival 20XX". Back now, a year and a half later, with much more polish to it. It's nice to hear in its full production though, it does a lot of favorites for extreme metal, especially with as much put into it instrumentally as Xoth has. The song closes out with a massive explosion of instrumentals and screams. In the original, everything is overpowered by the guitar, but on Interdimensional Invocations, the mix is done so clearly that everything is front and centre.
Xoth put their heart and soul into this record and it shines through. What they've done with Interdimensional Invocations stands to easily be the best death-thrash record of the year. The good news is, even though it's not out this Friday (October 18th), the album is available to stream in full below. If nothing else, do it to check out the artwork, best artwork of 2019.
