Photo by Myron Fung
West Coast deathgrind practitioners DEATHGRAVE will unleash their It’s Only Midnight full-length April 14th via Tankcrimes, today revealing the record’s first single, cover art, and preorders.
Comprised of longtime scene veterans, DEATHGRAVE is Greg Wilkinson (Autopsy, Brainoil, ex-Laudanum, ex-Graves At Sea), bassist Fern Alberts (Amber Asylum, ex-Bird, ex-Ringwurm), vocalist Andre Cornejo (ex-Cyanic, ex-Bird, ex-Casket Blaster), and Clint Zane (Owl, Hazzards Cure, ex-Isotope) who joined the band on drums in 2018. It’s Only Midnight dives deeper into the realms of grindcore while lacing new dimensions to their sound. The drums add polyrhythms and complex time signatures in a seemingly effortless fashion. Meanwhile, the guitar playing combines bizarre chords, fast chainsaw picking, chunky palm mutes, and unnerving echoing melodies into a unified style. Bass lines diverge from the guitar parts highlighting the pulverizing drive of the music. To cap things off, Cornejo delivers the most demanding performance to date. The amalgam of the four members spews out a new and undefinable sound. To say this is just another grind album would be a vast understatement.
In advance of the record’s release, today DEATHGRAVE unleashes a video (created by Douglas Lawlor) for their first single, “Your Rulers Are Here,” now playing at Decibel Magazine.
Comments Cornejo, “I really enjoy old, tucked away neighborhood bars. When one walks into one of these watering holes and there’s four people that might as well be statues staring straight into glasses creaking their necks to shoot confused wide-eyed glare at the unfamiliar face fills me with an exciting and uncomfortable joy. I will sit down and order a whiskey covered in decades of dust and start to imagine the stories of local patrons, eavesdropping on their sluggish drunken conversations while buried in a book. ‘Your Rulers Are Here’ is my homage to all of these reclusive dives and the eccentric communities that find themselves stumbling in and out of them on a daily basis. The lyrics convey that a Lovecraftian cosmic monstrosity has infiltrated a small bar, infecting the libations with alien biological goop to enslave the local community through alcoholism that leads to sickness in which these malevolent creatures feed upon.”
Writes Decibel, “…another warped collection of razor-sharp deathgrind tunes. DEATHGRAVE is its own bizarre, darkly funny thing entirely. It’s great to have them back in our lives… ‘Your Rulers Are Here,’ delivers the band’s signature punked-out death metal lurch and gross-out gallows humor in spades.
Watch DEATHGRAVE’s “Your Rulers Are Here” video at THIS LOCATION.
It’s Only Midnight will be released on CD and limited edition LP in three color variants (Cloudy Blue, Blue inside Clear w/ Smoke, and Red and Blue Wings w/ Splatter). A cassette edition will be released via a partnership with Transylvanian Records.
Find CD preorders HERE and LP preorders HERE.
It’s Only Midnight Track Listing:
- Ant Baby
- On All Fours
- Tony’s Deli
- Sewer Runs Through Her
- The Resigned
- Resure’wreck’ed
- Rats Are Back
- Slurring Sermons
- Your Rules Are Here
- Scratch, Sniff, Peel, Snack
- Lonely Streets
- Atomic Narcotic Withdrawal
Spawned in 2013, DEATHGRAVE began to weave its own breed of metal based out of San Jose, Califorrnia. The band initially grabbed elements from many punk and metal bands like Siege, Rudimentary Peni, Napalm Death, Impetigo, Godflesh, and Zeni Geva as well as their own previous bands, and many others, yet their actual musical output never shared a similar sound to the aforementioned artists.
Over the past ten years, the band has toured multiple regions throughout North America and kept busy recording. To date, DEATHGRAVE has released a demo, a Mexico tour cassette, four split 7″s, and a debut LP in 2018 which dragged them out from the depths of the underground and into the forefront of the Bay Area’s grind/metal scene. It’s Only Midnight is the second LP on Tankcrimes while marking the first release with their current drummer.
DEATHGRAVE:
Greg Wilkinson – guitar
Fern Alberts – bass
Andre Cornejo – vocals
Clint Zane – drums
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