Review: Gravesend Buries the Mean Streets of NYC with Gowanus Death Stomp

While many death and black metal bands tend toward dark fantasy for their subject matter, Gravesend wallows in the harsh realities of urban life. Call their style “war metal” if you want, but these guys aren’t here to show anyone anything other than just how mean New York streets can be. It gave their debut LP Methods of Human Disposal a convincing sense of grit and menace and loses none of its potency on Gowanus Death Stomp.

Gravesend starts and ends their new album with the sound of flies buzzing—presumably around the pungent rat carcass—which sets the mood like an ambient interlude would for a Euro-black metal band. Except “Deranged” and “Enraged” place the listener on a dilapidated subway station, where looking at the wrong person becomes a dangerous mistake. This intimidating sense of grit permeates throughout Gowanus Death Stomp, more than earning “11414” its name as a reference to a ZIP code in Queens. The raw, violent delivery brings streetwise scariness into a genre often pigeonholed into edgy fantasy. However, the music still very much resembles old-school black/death metal, held together by war metal’s animalistic tendencies.

While black metal plays a part in Gravesend’s sound, it recalls the Paul Ledney (Profanatica, Havohej) vision of US-Black Metal: a lineage of brutal melee that races straight back to Possessed’s Seven Churches. “Even A Worm Will Turn” has no use for keyboards or atmospheric ornamentation, basing itself on the hardest riffs possible played with menace turned all the way up. While not particularly diverse, Gravesend avoids the pitfalls of similar acts like Revenge by keeping their ideas catchy enough (and audible enough) to remember after they grind bones to dust. That’s the secret of why the title track encapsulates the magic Gowanus Death Stomp. It’s obnoxiously hateful, yet founded on an undeniably groovy shuffle. Death-stomping indeed!

What atmosphere does arise from a cut like “Festering In Squalor” comes from the tension of the guitars running the song’s riffs before the explosive blast beats kick in. While it’s really the half-time beat that sets the gnarled tone, the blinding speed doesn’t comprise a wall of impenetrable noise. The riffs are still tight and in line with more head-bangeable sections, as is the case with “Lupara Bianca.” It certainly works as a blackened grind assault with its jackhammer drums and cycling guitar strains, but repeating the same arrangement through the lumbering quarter-note march allows the character of Gravesend’s riffs to shine through without having to compromise any impact.

Even though cuts like “Code Of Silence” and “Make (One’s) Bones” would work perfectly well as no-holds-barred grindcore, they always do something like the former’s punkish boogies and “black metal waltzes” or the latter’s skull-caving four-on-the-floor beats to keep things spicey enough to merit lasting longer than the average grind track. In this way, “Streets Of Destitution” actually becomes a good reminder for aspiring war metallers. Truly heavy ideas can be fast, slow, or in between. It just depends on how you play it. Gravesend never holds punches but mixes up their combinations enough to keep everyone on their toes.

Although present in the band’s iconography, the mean street vibe of Gravesend isn’t just an aesthetic. Other than the intro and outro tracks, only the dronings and warbled samples at the start of “Crown Of Tar” directly point in such a direction. The rest just boils down to playing as hard as a random act of street violence. Even the lown drum fill that opens “Thirty Caliber Pesticide” packs some serious rage, as does that recurring “mid-tempo blast”—think of a blast beat rhythm, but played for velocity instead of speed. Just as the drums veer from punk rock tropes to double kicks and blasts, the guitars ebb and flow from power chords to tremolo blasts and stabbing chugs with equal vitality.

The real test of a black/death/war/whatever metal band becomes is whether their influences mesh seamlessly. Hard-riffing brawl-for-alls like “The Third Rail” and “Mortsafe (Resurrection Men)” flow naturally into the tremolo-centered cuts like “Carried By Six” and “Vermin Victory,” simply because there’s a comparable level of intensity in both cases. The guitars never get less rumbling, the vocals never get less bestial, and the drums never sound less abusive.

Gowanus Death Stomp provides various sonic hues to paint a picture of a tweaker getting curb-stomped in a filthy alleyway. It’s not exactly nice to look at, but Gravesend knows what they want to say with their music, and if it results in uncompromising extreme music with memorability to boot, it’s really a win for everyone.

Gravesend’s Gowanus Death Stomp is out Oct. 27 via 20 Buck Spin.