The world needs another death metal band like I need an extra asshole. Remember that saying “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.”? Well, every city seems to have a death metal band – some more than their share, some more than any of us need – and straight outta the Bay Area comes yet another steaming pile of either excrement or entrails by the name of BARBAROUS. We shall see…

Initium Mors (“The beginning of death”) blasts forward with the intro-less ‘Injection Of The Exhumed’, already something in that grisly, sharpened tone recalling the band’s heritage, ala Bonded By Blood, but on bath salts, POSSESSED on PCP. The section from 1:40-2:07 is a burlap sack filled with rusty circular saw blades obliterating your face over and fucking over, and the lack of a proper guitar solo makes the tune even more damaging. ‘By Lead Or Steel’ is unforgiving, the twin axe attack of Zach Weed and Thomas Belfiore slicing and dicing in the way CARCASS used to, dancing madly above the abusive Jakes/Zupo rhythm ravagers.

SKINLESS vibes (think Trample The Weak, Hurdle The Dead) slither through the title track, and I’m now noticing this band’s use of open space being put to great effect in a way most of today’s current crop simply either ignore or are incapable of. Sure, it’s all well and good to launch yourself forward at Mach 666 from time to time, but don’t make that your only trick, or you’ll deservedly be culled once this boom/glut is over. The coda of ‘Initium Mors’ is placed too ideally where it lies in the song to be anything other than solid songcraft and care over the arrangement, something also missing from a good many nowadays, genre be damned.

‘Conscious Decomposition’ writhes ‘n’ retches, perversion in musical form, vokillist Travis LeBerge’s harangues and horrors all the more potent for being – of all things – understandable. He wants you to know what he’s singing about, to have the subject matter shoved down your throat and to worm around in your guts for days. Slamming shut the cellar door on Initium Mors, ‘Coup De Grace’ condemns us to a future of darkness and eternal demise amid cannon fire drums and devilish lead guitar battles.

Entrails, bloody entrails. Definitely worth wading through the offal (and awful) for, BARBAROUS’ debut surely and unceremoniously heralds the arrival of a formidable force in the metal of death.
Review By: Lord Randall

BARBAROUS
Initium Mors
Creator-Destructor Records