Death, Doom and Destruction

This is Cianide’s third album, originally from 1997, but now being rereleased. Their first two, The Dying Truth and Descent into Hell, were amazingly swamplike in tone, with this squelchy production job and an irresistible knack for the most fearsome downtempo hooks. They are highly relevant today, actually, prefiguring a lot of the slower, ‘cavernous’ kinds of death metal, as well as ultra-primitivists like Undergang, and for that matter the rougher end of doom-death (e.g. Coffins and the like). More recently, they have had a drier, more austere death metal sound- I recall likening their last full-length album (2011’s Gods of Death) to Jungle Rot, of all people.

Anyway, Death, Doom and Destruction is a compact and powerful album which sort of straddles these stages. Rage War, at only two minutes long, is a brutal, thrash-influenced opener in the vein of later Master releases. It crunches and punches rather than squishes; an effect carried over into This World Will Burn. The latter is a more mid-tempo tune (as you would expect of Cianide) but one which tends to groove in the mid-90s fashion, rather than gurglingly envelop as on earlier records. If this makes it sound slightly more conventional, then there are definitely compensations in the way it is executed: some of the slower hooks here are extremely powerful in their simplicity- e.g. Envy and Hatred, The Power to Destroy, or the unscientifically-titled Metal Never Bends. And the more up-tempo tracks are concise and aggressive; Deadly Spawn, for example, which would definitely appeal to fans of Hate Eternal, earlier Decapitated- those sorts of bands.

Only seven tracks, but this reissue also features seven bonus additions, mainly earlier demo versions, though there is a great cover of fellw Chicagoans DeathStrike (The Truth), which fits right in. Probably not a distinctive and interesting as some of Cianide’s other work, but definitely worth excavating from the dark recesses of late ‘90s death metal history.