Label: Xtreem Music
Release date: March 4th, 2025
After quite long ”vacations” when it takes writing reviews and stuff like that (I’ll not describe the reasons for this shit right here, because it’s not the right place for it and I deeply doubt anybody could be interested in reading this), I’m back! And as a first go find 1991 real legend of death metal and their eight full-length. Well, the number of albums isn’t too impressive either. But instead they have, let’s call it, tons of other stuff – splits, demos and so on. Anyway, since they come from the country which is not too popular on the metal mainstream scene, what’s very strange for me, because Spain has one o highest number of metal bands per capita – not only in Europe, but on the whole planet. But the fact is that this is very possible it’s the first contact with the name Avulseed. Personally I somehow can’t get it, but the truth is I grew up not only with mainstream metal bands, but also, or maybe even first of all, into the underground and such ensembles are for me must-to-know ones.
By the way, let’s finally talk about what is the most important thing in our lives – music. And to be honest this review could be very short and be like ”that’s really great album!”. But I think it’d be too easy to do it like that. Besides, as we all know very well death metal, the same like every other sub-genre of our beloved music, has many faces. And it means I need to continue my scribble as well. Album contains eleven tracks of old-school death metal and takes forty four minutes and twenty two seconds. So, as you can see, Dave Rotten and his new (they joined the band 2023 or, in the most of cases, even last year) partners in sound crime don’t fuck around. This is of course technically advanced creativity, even if you shouldn’t expect some sophisticated as hell guitar tricks, complicated drum passages and stuff like that. The most important thing for Dave was always brutality! It doesn’t mean guys beat light or even sound speed here. That’s actually one more evidence that playing brutal music is not the same thing as playing as fast as possible. Mostly tempo is the middle one, sometimes it happens of course they speed up or even contrary, but generally… There’s also a right dose of melody, the sick one of course, you’ll notice while listening to ”Phoenix Cryptobiosis”.
As we who have listened to this music for many years, know every country has its own style. Of course you can say, and it’ll be true, differences between them are very often subtle ones. But at the same time that’s a huge problem for someone who has experienced ears to recognize them. Anyway, the Spanish one is, and actually always was, near to the Swedish one as well. I don’t think I should name some ensembles here. Firstly, I never do such things and secondly, it’d be too easy even if I’d only mention some albums’ titles. Instead I write only that if you call yourself a death metal fan, then you just must spend these few Euros for it! As far as I know, Xtreem Music released stuff is available in every possible format, so you can make a choice which one you wanna have. Second thing I’d like to write here before I’ll be forced to leave ”Phoenix…” and go to another stuff is this is probably the best, or at least one of the best full-length Avulses ever released, even if they, in my opinion, never released even an average album. So, if you saw the name of this, as for me, legend of death metal for the first time, then you should check out their earlier releases. All of them are available on Dave’s label. I mentioned a few lines before.
Oh… I forgot about something quite important, let’s call it technical information. I mean, the date of this masterpiece’s premiere. It’s very fresh stuff, because it ssaw light of the day (or darkness of the night, if you prefer) March 4th.
