Generichrist – Taste of Death

We just love being confused, it’s good for our blood.  In fact, you know, write this down, if something’s hard to pin down with a genre and you feel like a hack when you pull out some band comparisons because you completely lack the writing skills to explain it otherwise, it’s going to be good.  All good music today, especially in almost any genre of metal, is exactly that.  Can’t explain it with band references or genres?  Good, very good.  That makes the name of this band humorous considering our discussion here, for Generichrist is most certainly not generic.  Are they thrash?  Are they a little crust?  Are they some punk action?  Some blackening of the death of the metal?  Shit, we just broke our own mantra from the start of this very review and pulled out Goddamn tags.  Cut, restart.  Generichrist are one of the best things to come out of Tampa, Florida, probably, since Nocturnus.   Wait a minute…that’s a band name…  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.  Okay, scratch that too, but hey, let’s say this, Tampa has something going on, and that something is Generichrist, a five-piece that has power beyond their confrontational cover art.

  

Funny that anything could be remotely confrontational today, what with bands like Prostitute Disfigurement out there trying to confront in name as well as art.  But whereas bands like that (please bear with this band reference) go for the Realism approach, Generichrist is going for retro, but with that biting, modern “don’t give a fvck” crappiness that somehow ends up looking good.  And they threw in some biting sexuality at the same time.  Cocaine, metal posters, a toilet filled with fecal matter splattered everywhere, high-heels even, this has got it all.  Now, typically you see art like this and there’s a reason it looks so below the usual standards for visuals in metal.  Usually it means what’s found inside sounds worse than it looks, to be honest.  This, however, somehow makes the art and everything else about this band better than one could ever expect.  But yet, at the same time, it’s not a matter of going in with lower standards, it a matter of having those standards stomped into the ground so you can see the real standards that were standing there behind them the whole time.

 

Taste of Death, after opening with a rather lengthy sample intro that almost dips into Mortician territory (sorry, had to pull that one out, it’s the last one we swear), rips it like the chiseled zombie on the cover.  If the synchronization between the guitars, bass, and drums in “Monsters And Myths” doesn’t tell you these guys are about to make you a fan of having sex in a squat trailer, then the grind will.  And how it grinds.  Generichrist completely understand the necessity of riff power, it’s all here.  Every moment of your life will now be turned into a moment to let the hair down and swing it around.  Further, the vocalist has really got it together.  Straightforward is not the way anymore, we need variety, and this guy has it.  He can go from screams to roars to yells to shrieks all without losing the general aesthetic that Taste of Death is about; filthy old metal with some of the most mind-bending solos and bridges we’ve heard in awhile.  That run on “Hexx”, for example, yeah.  Actually, you know what, fvck our meager words here, just listen to the Goddamn thing and get it over with.  In fact we can end by summarizing it by referring to the song titles.  “Kill Your Parents”.  “Fuck to Get High”.  That’s what this is about.

 

Generichrist Official Facebook

Written by Arkus the Evil Dictator

Generichrist – Taste of Death
Horror Pain Gore Death Productions
4.8 / 5