Massacre - From Beyond
Review: Both thunderous in its sagging, palm-muted throb and fast in its Slayer-inspired running-phrase riffing is Massacre from Florida, a band placed so solidly in the genre of death metal as to be definitive. Riffs avoid musical motion in the conventional sense and instead favor recursive, chromatic, nihilistic themes and rhythmic communication of urgency and violence. Where this dominates, as does most extreme death metal, is in the shaping of melody and rhythm however brief to convey motion without harmonic dependence. In these simply structured songs are recombined several platforms of custom adaptation for guitar solos and other depositions of logical encoding.
The band of allstars: Rick Rozz, the whammy-bar screamer from Death's Leprosy, composes the power chord symphonies of each song; Bill Andrews, also of Death fame, plays drums in a Lombardo-inspired power groove of intense adaptivity and expression; Kam Lee throats subsonic guttural decompositions with depth and incoherence; Terry Butler (see Death notes, above) handles bass, a man born to follow the root note to its death, doubling the muted strumming Massacre synchronize to their drumbeats for hammering effective percussion.
Songs vary in essential style, some more approaching the music of Kiss and other such hardrockers but more songs expressing the fundamental nihilistic breakdown of bands like Death who reduced riffs to rhythmic motion between a mathematical division of a scale, either fast double-bass rolling masterpieces of freedom expressed in conflict rhythms or tempo reduced galley-oars masterpieces of agonizingly slow and pummeling death metal. In about half of them the silvery shivers of Rozz's magic fingers guitar noise leave discontiguous, apathetic, and fatalistic curls in the entrails of scalar order.
From simple origins life arose, and here from the recombinant bits of scale in power chords and the trenchant drumming of master tempo adjuster Andrews comes a strikingly lucid, evocative composition of simple motions and their counteractions. Its urgency and B-movie alarm only bely the calm sensitivity of this music to the destructive forces at work beneath our everyday existence.