Drawn and Quartered – The One Who Lurks (WTF Am I Looking At Metal)

 

Boy did I sit on this one a long time. I mean, yeah, we sit on stuff a long time in general, but this is different because hard copy submissions, provide we will review them in the first place, have always gotten priority. Why you break your own rules? My excuse is I listened to it several times in the car, then on the computer, and it had been sitting there for so long it was just kind of a thing to not review it, almost a tradition, until I realized how asinine that was and I said “okay let’s review this now.” So here we are, like six months later. But that mathematically makes sense because The One Who Lurks is Drawn and Quartered’s first full-length in six years. Nice, I somehow found a way to justify that delay.

    

Part of it was I was staring at that lovely, grotesque cover by mystery-man Gabriel Byrne, an American-born gore master who currently lives in Germany. I have no idea what I’m looking at and the more I try the more my mind gets lost in details. Great, just found a way to justify where I was going with this because Drawn and Quartered have certainly made the proverbial lurking comeback. The One Who Lurks advances a 25-year career into modern territory. So it’s death metal, you’ll get that, but it’s darker and stickier, moving along with a slouching gait. What’s immediately noticeable about this one is though it fits into the modern death metal canon easily, Drawn and Quartered lurk their own way. The guitars ring with a shriek over the droll and sludge of the drums, and the riffs take novel turns that don’t rely on tradition, yet remain grounded in the filth of the vocal spew tossed upon it. Considering I’ve listened to it about 30 times I have to say it has that rare feature of surviving repeat exposure, with new details to find, much like the cover. Sometimes their style is strange in its progression, but this somehow adds to its gutter charm.

  

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Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls

Drawn and Quartered – The One Who Lurks
Deadtapes, Krucyator Productions
4 / 5