Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! Hope the weather in your area isn't as bad as the Northeast, and if it is then here's some killer jams to jam while you're snowed in! If not then go drive around and listen or whatever it is you're supposed to do when you're not snowed in. You know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I've been saying, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
So who's in the mood for gory, grindy, groovy, fuzzy metal from Dead Again?
The Basic Idea
Dead Again is a riff machine that hits hard and will have you involuntarily headbanging and invisible orange-ing at every single minute of every single song. They sing about slasher flicks and Satan without being cheesy. They incorporate a little grind, a little punk and a whole lot of groove into their musical corpse stew and serve up an appetizing plate of death n' roll. Dead Again is a lesson in how you take rock and metal it right the fuck up.
Why I Love It
Occultus Lake is seriously 21- minutes of pure riff fury. If you took bands like The Sword and Clutch, put them in a room and made them watch 48-hours of nothing but horror flicks with soundtracks by bands like Take Over and Destroy, they'd come out sounding a whole hell of a lot like Dead Again- pissed off, gory and chock full of groovy ideas that'll get you whole-body headbanging.
If you're looking for a quick fix of what to expect from the album, skip right to the song "The Lament Configuration." The song starts off with just a guitar riff that you know is going to explode into something great, but instead gets overtaken by blasting drums and a heavily distorted bass. Of course there's a brief pause and then boom! Right into the heavy riff-fest you knew was coming. So the song barrels out of your headphones like a stampede of Satan's horses for a little while until… oh hey there stop-and-go blasts, it's been a while! The beauty of it is that the switching between styles works so well and breaks up the monotony of what could have been an incredibly boring "here's a metal riff that we're going to groove on ad nauseam" kind of song. Oh, did I mention the song clocks in at a total of 75-seconds? That's important.
Dead Again, much like horror icons such as Jason and Michael Myers, will rip the skin and muscles from your bones over a period of time ensuring your suffering. Except this is a good suffering- this is you listening to a record wondering how the living hell you never came up with any of these riffs and crying yourself to sleep because of it. Occultus Lake is a great debut that'll leave you searching for the "repeat album" button on your player and sets the bar high for Dead Again… but with a debut like this, their future is bright.
