Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.
Morbus Chron: Creepy Creeping Creeps 7″ (Detest / Me Saco Un Ojo, 9/12/2010)
Morbus Chron: “Creepy Creeping Creep”[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/01-Creepy-Creeping-Creep.mp3|titles=01 Creepy Creeping Creep]
In 2010, long-haired Swedish young-adult males are still releasing melody-infused death metal, and they’re still donning denim and puffy sneakers for their graveyard promo shots. In 2010, this music is still engaging, especially when it is executed as cleverly as Morbus Chron‘s debut seven-inch.
Detest Records has made a name for itself by releasing compelling vinyl offerings of death metal that very well could have been conceived in 1989. Morbus Chron does not buck this trend. Earlier this year, the band received a much-coveted shout-out from Fenriz of Darkthrone on his “Band of the Week” blog, and it also graced the pages of the Vice Magazine blog. Although its demo was slightly under-formed, this EP, though short, demonstrates a keen song-writing instinct.
The melodic Scandinavian heritage of Dismember and Entombed cannot go unmentioned, but this is a hybrid of thrash, death, and doom riffs that recalls bands like Dream Death that were playing with these concepts before the rules for sub-genres were established. The macabre humor also conjures up images of Autopsy, as does the penchant for punk-ish fast parts leading into unsettling doom passages. Some of Morbus Chron’s greatest successes come when it employs the classic death-metal songwriting technique of introducing a riff then modulating it to a different key when vocals are introduced. Clever variations on a theme, as well as an extremely catchy uptempo back beat near the end of the title track, set this EP apart from other “old school” death-metal compositions.
Though at some level this music is coated in a B-movie aesthetic, the silliness does not detract from its musical impact. The echoing grunts that start off each side of the record, while comical, are also exciting in a completely non-ironic way. This balance of taste is a phenomenon that, when performed correctly, adds to the value of a release. It is most apparent in “extreme” music like death metal, hardcore, and gangsta rap. This is not an ironic appreciation of outsider art, where the idea of being into something is more important than the thing itself. Nor is this a search for authenticity in music through an attempt to find the most obscure artist with the most compelling, whimsical back story. This is the complex, contradictory nature of humanity reflected in the fabric of the music itself. This is real personality expressed through art that can be lost when everything fits too nicely into its right place.