Listen: Death Fortress Forces You On A Deathless March

Death metal and black metal both need a shake-up. Dipping into the same pool of tropes, recent albums in each genre have struggled to showcase ideas distinctively. The going gets tougher when the genres cross paths (the lines blur ever more): blastbeats and/vs. grunts, atmosphere and/vs. outright violence, long and/vs. short tracks? How to you write powerful artwork using all tools of extreme music without descending into absurdity, the bad kind?

A New Jersey band called Death Fortress have figured it out on their new album Deathless March Of The Unyielding. They turn the inchoate into the oddly coherent. Swaths of sublime black metal expand between full-on death assaults; then, straight, growly attacks nest within scary atmospheres of dementia and schizophrenia. Listenable chaos and chaotic listening in tune!

Think of the crazy soapbox dude downtown with the stinky jacket and the moment that begins to make a strange sort of sense. Or, when all the horrible noise frequencies in your head resolve to sympathetic tones whose sad beauty can’t be ignored. Those are the right times to spin Deathless March.

Deathless March Of The Unyielding came out last week via Fallen Empire Records. Get it here.