Having never come across these guys before, thirty seconds into ‘Insult’, the thought ‘these fuckers are South American’ rammed itself into my brain and wouldn’t leave. A cursory glance at Metal Archives has confirmed conclusively that my ‘necro radar’ is all present and correct. This is an absolutely textbook example of blasphemous blackened death/thrash done the South American way and an invigorating blast it is too. Crawling from the swamp of a sludgy, cavernous production, opener ‘Black Vengeance’ is an absolutely monsterous statement of intent - ‘Reign In Blood’-era Slayer collides with Sarcofago and elements of early Immolation to cook up a cracking stew of headbanging blasphemy.
Wonderfully old-school but not in any way a throwback, this is the kind of death/thrash that people with any taste should be listening to, not the plasticised nonsense that clutters the scene these days. You can feel the intent coursing through these riffs, smell the sweat beading tattooed arms as they crank out the buzzsaw aggression and pounding drum fills. What is great about ‘Insult’ is that it isn’t quite the one-note barrage that albums of this ilk can sometimes become - they drop in the odd eerie interlude, mix up the pace and experiment with developed song structures. Indeed, compared to some of their contemporaries, this is practically prog with ‘Stained by Blood’ evolving from monolithic mid-paced stomper to thrashing violence with satisfying elegance. Elsewhere, we have the title track which kicks in with one of THOSE riffs halfway through (think the breakdown in ‘Angel of Death’...) whilst ‘Decline of Faith’ kicks in with an face-beatingly vicious gallop.
Ultimately, what Grave Desecrator have shown with this album is just how satisfying and downright infectious thrash is when it’s done properly. For a genre that all too often ends up becoming a self-referential, mono-dimensional borefest, these guys have shown that a bit of thought into riff-writing and song structure can elevate this style into one of the most instant, horn-raising, fist-banging fixes in town.
http://www.hellsheadbangers.com/gravedesecrator
