DEATH ANGEL
Killing Season
(Nuclear Blast)

IMPALED
The Last gasp
(Willowtip)

THE HEX DISPENSERS
S/T
(Alien Snatch)

BLUNDERBUSS
S/T
(Escape Artist)

SAVIOURS
Into Abaddon
(Kemado)

WAR FROM A HARLOTS
MOUTH
Transmetropolitan 

(Lifeforce)

SYNAESTHESIA
The Requiem Reveries

(Vendlum)

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Oh man, how times have changed. It was last night that I was driving my mother to the shopping center and in all my immature bliss I decided to blast this new slab of gore metal just for kicks. In all her mature innocence she asked me what it was that noise I was so obnoxiously playing and I mentioned that we were listening to a California based band named Impaled. Then she asked what the name meant so I translated and went on with a pretty graphic explanation of how this band had decided to named themselves after a method of torture whereby a person is pierced with a long stake mostly through the anus and then went on about how this band likes to write witty lyrics about cool stuff like diseases, blood, torture, shit and all sorts of wholesome stuff like that when I was suddenly interrupted by laughter. Yes, she basically went on non stop for about a minute thinking that Impaled’s subject matter was actually quite funny and it dawned on me that perhaps, my mom, at her sixty somethings,  was perhaps getting Impaled more than I do. At least in all the tongue in cheek sense. After all, as far as I know, no Impaled band member is out there killing people, sucking blood, feasting on shit or practicing anal sex with long pieces of wood. Not as far as I know.

Where I got Impaled more than my mom was musically. (On our way back she was almost screaming for me to take it off and stop the torture already.) Because despite what one might think, The Last Gasp (the band’s fourth full-length) is super musical.  So it wasn’t that hard to get into or even groove to. Potentially, a band like Impaled could appeal to many fans of melodic heavy metal and also a respectable percentage of those that love the not so new school of melodic Swedish death metal. As melodically and ornamentally arranged as death metal can get, The Last Gasp actually gets. Tubby riffs are piled in decorous manner, switching speed in effortless fashion at times recalling latter day Carcass and damn nearly shattering all preconceptions one might hold after checking the disgusting cover artwork.  As guttural as one of the two voices gets (the other is a bit raspier and angrier) the songs are also laid out in verse-chorus-verse fashion this way even breaking the tempo and melody to give way to fluorescent solos which give the songs a brilliant sparkle. No doubt about that the most transgressive aspect of Impaled is not their music, where we to judge them solely on that; chances are they’d be a much bigger band. But they just wouldn’t be Impaled.

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