when Denver death metal came to Everett: Astral Tomb, Insipidus, Cronos Compulsion & Sunshine Lollipop

On Wednesday night March 23rd at Tony V’s Garage in Everett three Denver, Colorado area bands brought their death metal. Cronos Compulsion kicked things off with their old-school death doom. They have their slower moments and they also launch into high speed headbanging segments. Their music overall stays more in the primal, brutal side of things.

Cursed and Decaying by Cronos Compulsion

https://www.facebook.com/cronoscompulsion

Insipidus followed with their guitar-shredding-jamming death metal. The growling and drumming make you think this is death metal, but the guitar is not the normal or expected death metal riffs. Rather, there is a shreddy, jam or solo-mania trait going on that suggests that there are other things happening besides regular death metal. When you hear the music on the recording it already seems like a sound individual to the band, and when you hear it live that is confirmed. It is a bit different, and sometimes it sounds like the guitar goes into its own little world of shredding and soloing, all the while the growling, drums and bass are keeping the main road of the rhythm steady so that listener does not lose track. The band played its own material, and also did at least three covers: Deicide, Sepultura and Death.

https://www.facebook.com/insipidusband

INSIPIDUS Banal Apathy — Demo by Insipidus

The third band was Sunshine Lollipop from Washington state. This is a band obsessed with destroying and ridiculing music as we know it. Their positive-mind grind songs last anywhere from one to 30 seconds. They say that their lyrics are all about happiness, and they even played a birthday song for a man that said it was his birthday. The band told him that they loved him, and the strange man revealed that he had lied to all of us and it was not really his birthday, and so we grabbed objects to throw to the stranger because of how furious we felt at being lied to at a metal show. Just kidding. We did not assault the stranger. That would violate the rules of Sunshine Lollipop.

This band also played a longer song that could have lasted up to two minutes, which felt like an eternity. I sensed that they were mocking the laziness of doom bands’ one-note boring super long songs of nothing-happening. The band, I believe, likes to play short songs because they love it when people clap every few seconds, which is what happened on this night. So many short songs (maybe 25?!), and people clapped. A lot. A whole lot. The drummer, Scott Sandefur (formerly of death metal monkey wrench wielders Born Without Blood, and he’s also like in a dozen other bands of all genres), told me that they are not on social media yet and they have not published any music. This was their first show; and I was there to witness it. You were not. So sad for you.

Astral Tomb closed with their “cosmic death metal,” which is another way of saying psychedelic death metal. Imagine a bunch of hippies (into Cream, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Mountain, Black Sabbath, Sir Lord Baltimore, Uriah Heep and all that expansive heaviness) teleported to 2022 and discovering that they like the heaviness and brutality of death metal but want to keep the adventurous spirit of Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” There is growling, but there are long instrumental passages. The music goes anywhere from blasting speed brutality to mellow, quiet segments, and everything in between. Perhaps not by coincidence, the band likes to wear tie-dye shirts, which adds to the idea of “cosmic death metal” or “psychedelic death metal” or whatever other similar term is preferred. They are following up their 2021 EP with a full-length called Soulgazer out on March 25th.

Soulgazer by ASTRAL TOMB

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063825054335

Degradation of Human Consciousness by Astral Tomb