review: Atavistik Death Pose

Atavistik Death Pose

Atavistik Death Pose

WOOAAARGH Records

September 13th 2019

In the days of extreme metal’s beginnings in the early 1980s the socially resentful malcontent kids with no recording experience, very little skill, and no money would get together in a garage and do their best to play as loud and as brutal as they possibly could. Today you can hear what the results of those adventures were. The Hellhammer, Sodom, and Mantas/Death demos that were considered garbage by just about every metal music fan, including by the bands themselves, are barbaric and chaotic, and show “musicians” obsessed with taking extremity as far as they could at the time in terms of heaviness and outrageous vocals. It sounded like the music was recorded with the band playing live in their own crude way, while a friend stands around holding up a cellphone to record their rehearsal, except that it was a cassette tape recorder, not a cellphone.

Such cave-people brutality is the essence of the 12 minutes of Atavistik Death Pose’s recording. The gutter garage sounds of extreme punk/metal is the only objective at hand. The drummer sounds like Animal from The Muppet Show going crazy on drums as Animal tends to do, and the guitar makes sure to play as heavy as possible without solos and without melodies (maybe they don’t know how to do solos or because they like sounding like brutes) and the vocals holler, grunt, growl, bark, barf, and scream as obnoxiously as possible. The result is not substantially different from those early 1980s demos, except that this recording is more like mutant punk metal.

Next thing you know, it’s all over because it is only 12 minutes, and before you ask yourself, “What was that stuff?” the music (using the term very loosely) begins again in order to witness this monstrosity once more. Approach if you like to hear punks beat up on music, and avoid if you want polished music. This is the equivalent of a bunch of angry anarchists breaking into the Louvre Museum in order to draw graffiti on the Mona Lisa. wooaaargh.bandcamp.com/album/atavistik-death-pose-s-t