BIRD EATER
Utah
(Exigent)

JESU
Lifeline
(Hydra Head)

EVILE
Enter the Grave
(Earache)

STINKING LIZAVETA
Scream of the Iron Iconoclast
(At a Loss)

WOLVES IN THE
THRONE ROOM
Two Hunters
(Southern Lord)

RED FANG
S/T 

(Wantage)

PURE SOUNDART
Emo is Dead

(Lockjaw)

MORE REVIEWS

Quiet beginnings are quite telling. Especially when you know there are only a few seconds between all that mental passivity they help you navigate in and getting your ass handed in chunklets in a silver plate via brutal growls, sick convoluted riffs and all the senseless violence music can pack in about three minutes.  Bird Eater hail from Salty Lake City, the same city that Exigent Records calls as headquarters, and counts members of Days of Less and the great Gaza in its ranks. The band makes pretty blunt and beefy extreme metal. Mostly death metal, but not only it. There are moments of pure doomish beats (“Questions For a Ghost Maker”, interesting guitar approach), but these are rarely interspersed by some massive brutality and more agile rhythmic exercises. (“It Takes Days to Boil the Bones”). There is also a hardcore spirit floating around Utah, except it has been dipped in the past two decades of metal.

Utah starts quietly, but the calmed beginnings of the record prove to be more than an artifice. Bird Eater is trying to work some extremes here. Their MySpace page cites ‘country’ as a style; but what we are at once dealing with here is the sparse and isolate instrumental music of a band like Earth.  The song in question (“It Takes Days to Boil the Bones”) is quite stunning; starts off massive with flexible metal rhythmic patterns, quite hardcore-ish, but gradually evolves inwards, with a quite pretty mid-passage, before coming to an end in doom-laden fashion.  Very promising, I really wanted more than six songs.

MySpace