LACERATION – Demise / CD JEWELCASE

“Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.” Epicurus, Principal Doctrines

Sitting down and soaking in the major milestone that ‘Demise‘ represents for twice resurrected Windsor, California death metal quartet Laceration is a profound experience not only as an adult-sized and properly sorted debut full-length but for the waves of collapse and rebirth they’d left in their wake getting there, discovering their rhythm after climbing uphill rather than taking any sort of pay-to-play escalator to the top. To the outsider it will appear as any other ‘old school’ death metal made beyond the late 90’s does, nostalgic by way of a less commercialized vision of the sub-genre prior to 1993 — Purposefully ignorant of any/all competitive extremist’s version of “progress”, a clock turned back to late 80’s thrash metal influenced standards of old and revised into an incredibly detailed audio-visual package that speaks clearly and coherently to Death. From my point of view there is no better tradition within United States-spawned music than this death-thrashing meditation upon mortality, suffering, mayhem and the riff yet, I know I am an outlier in this sense and it will prove somewhat straight-forward to the laymen otherwise.