DEMIRICOUS’ TWO (POVERTY) MAKES US WANNA START A BAR FIGHT

Demiricous played in Brooklyn last night and I couldn’t make it – which seems to be the story of my life these days. At least I can console myself with repeated loud blasting of Two (Poverty), their excellent new release on Metal Blade. If Demiricous were a cartoon, they’d be the Tazmanian Devil; if they were an event, they’d be a bar fight; if they were an amusement park ride, they’d be a hideous rollercoaster that goes too fast before finally flying off the rails and killing dozens of innocent people; in point of fact, if they spit in your mom’s face and then punched kicked her in the vag, you couldn’t proclaim surprise. All of which is just a long, drawn-out way of saying that this album is very, very good.

There seem to be people out there who are actually upset that Demiricous sound a lot like Slayer. I really just don’t fucking understand that as a mode of criticism, for the following reasons:

1. Slayer are an awesome band, and an awesome band to sound like.
2. Every band and their mother sounds like Slayer these days.
3. No one seems to give a flying fuck that Merciless Death, Municipal Waste, etc. really do sound exactly like old 80’s thrash bands.
4. There are bands who are much more egregiously ripping off other bands right now (Trivium, Throwdown, etc.).
5. Kerry King himself has said how much he loves Demiricous. KERRY KING HIM MOTHERFUCKING SELF.

I mean, seriously: these dudes are metal like a mouthful of brass knuckles, and Two never, ever, ever lets up – not for a milisecond. From the dizzying whirlwind of “Knuckle Eye” to the acidic slip-slide that is  “Appreciation for Misery,” from beat-you-s0-bad-your-own-mother-won’t-be-able-to-ID-you assault of “Leprosaic Belief” to the bouncing, blast beat-laden groove of “Language of Oblivion” the material is genrally face-meltingly fast n’ lean: with a few notable exceptions, most of the twelve songs are just barely over three minutes.

And can we just go ahead and name Erik Rutan producer of the year? Between Vital Remains’ Icons of Evil, Through the Eyes of the Dead’s Malice, and now this album, the guy is just rocking the shit this year (last year’s work with Cannibal Corpse and Goatwhore was obviously pretty bad assed, too). He gets a much crunchier guitar tone out of axe slingers Ben Parrish and Scott Wilson than Zeuss did on the band’s debut, One (Hellbound), and  Dustin Boltjes’ drums sound positively MASSIVE – all of this in addition to the fact that bassist/singer Nate Olp gives a considerably more nuanced, though still vicious, vocal performance. I actually loved the way he sounded on One – I swear to God, Olp must have been eating Broken Glass Cereal for breakfast every morning before heading over to the studio – but here he adopts the kind of kick ass growl-sing in which guys like Hetfield and Araya used to specialize, and it just sound fuckin’ sweet – like everything Demiricous does, it’s just the right mix of being modern-yet-old-school.

What else do I need to tell you to make you buy this fucking record? If you’re too lazy to go to the store and get a good, old fashioned hard copy, it’ll cost you a whopping eight bucks on iTunes. Go fucking buy it already so that next year they can release Three (Perfectly Comfortable, Thank You).

(four out of five horns)

-AR

Demiricous are on tour right now. Get dates on their MySpace page.