Santa Fe’s STREET TOMBS approaches its stench-ridden tenth year writhing in life’s rotting embrace, and what better way to celebrate with a hopefully pummeling death metal monster? Let’s find out if Existence Is Corruption…
Careening and crusted over, ‘Pestilent Storm’ spot welds the early Combat Core sound of ENGLISH DOGS and BROKEN BONES to MONSTROSITY’s Imperial Doom with devastating consequences. ‘Deceptor’ bristles with a more thrash style, as ‘Septic Values’ returns us to the oft’ missed days and nights of shows at local punk squats/basements with 6-10 bands (“$5 or bring canned food for donation to the local food bank”) where crusties, lost hippies, metalheads and anarcho-punks reveled in glorious, abject squalor and noise.
Choppy riffs are sharks at a feeding frenzy in ‘Upset The Grave’ losing neither intensity nor focus despite being more mid-paced than anything thus far, a classic-at-birth HELLHAMMER-influenced riff from 2:30-2:53 kicking off with Warrior’s should-be-patented “unh!”. ‘Mental Mutilation’ dives wholeheartedly back into the punk/crust of before (and we get another “unh” at the start, but trust me, it belongs there), but flavored with a chunk of MALEVOLENT CREATION at times.
‘Braindead’ and ‘Parasitic Feast’ are the one-two punch that brings this filthy fandango to its close, STREET TOMBS following the path of many alumni of the “get in, grind, get out” school, which works to its advantage on Existence Is Corruption. Which it is. And this is its death knell.
Honestly, it’s just great to hear a standard death metal quartet bashing it out with no frills, no breakdowns, no self-important technical wankery. Blue Collar death metal at its basest, at its best.
Review By: Lord Randall
STREET TOMBS
Existence Is Corruption
Carbonized Records