“Gathering the stars for you, I rid myself of evil,” our young hero sings. It’s not all black metal, either four of the album’s 10 tracks are atmospheric instrumentals, and the closing song, “Swordsman,” is a delicate ballad of unadorned piano and clean vocals. By infusing his songs with the theatrical romanticism of The Cure and The Crow, Këkht Aräkh has made the rare raw black metal album that can be recommended to people not already indoctrinated into the lo-fi cult. On his sophomore album, Pale Swordsman, he leans hard into the imagery and atmosphere of ’80s goth while writing some of the best icy black metal riffs this side of Immortal.
Këkht Aräkh, the promising one-man band from Ukraine, understands this better than most. The difference between The Smiths and Mayhem was one of volume, not of tenor. Setting aside the church burnings and murders, the early ’90s wave of black metal was essentially a bunch of alienated young men from a cold part of the world putting on makeup and writing sad songs. It’s been a long year, and we all deserve to scream “Once alive/Now forgotten/Slaughtered for no fucking reason” back at Corpsegrinder. The stage is where Cannibal truly shines, so it’s a relief that it’s finally beginning to feel like shows are on their way back. Cannibal Corpse have always paid special attention to sequencing, and the first four songs here-“Murderous Rampage,” “Necrogenic Resurrection,” “Inhumane Harvest,” and the Rutan-penned pandemic anthem “Condemnation Contagion”-feel like the first four songs of a live set.
It’s a slaughterhouse of scorching riffs, frenetic solos, pummeling drums, and a characteristically unhinged vocal performance by George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, whose inimitable growl has aged like a fine wine. Cannibal Corpse is still Cannibal Corpse, and you already know what the excellent Violence Unimagined sounds like. That’s all true, but let’s be honest with ourselves here. It’s tempting to use what’s different about the 15th Cannibal Corpse album as a hook-longtime producer Erik Rutan is in the band now, troubled guitarist Pat O’Brien is out, they made it without ever having all five members in the studio at the same time. What you see is what you get-a very fun hard rock record that was clearly made by teenagers, but that absolutely deserves its 35-years-overdue release. The chief lyrical concerns of Killers on the Run are, in no particular order: getting girls, getting high, getting drunk, not listening to teachers and/or preachers, and the almighty power of rock n’ roll. Lovegrove and his young compatriots split the difference between Dokken’s nitro-charged take on hair metal and Rush’s AOR-adjacent hits to make the kind of smoky hard rock you might stumble upon while scanning FM stations late at night, and they’re talented enough to make sure their songs worm into your brain. As you might imagine, a big part of the album’s charm lies in its youthful naïveté, but that isn’t to say it’s not musically accomplished. In 2019, singer and guitarist Malcolm Lovegrove miraculously found those 1987 demos, and following a painstaking restoration and remastering process, the long-lost Killers on the Run album is now widely available for the first time via Pennsylvania’s Heaven and Hell Records. The tapes from those sessions were thought to be lost in a house fire, and for decades, Sinistar were just another high school rock band, destined to be remembered only by those who were there at the time. The debut album by New York’s Sinistar was recorded in 1987, when the members of the band were just teenagers. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track
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