After the well received 7” for Seventh Dagger, Seattle based Parasitic Skies are back with the full length album, The Descent. For those not familiar with the band – they stand for straight edge and veganism and musically are leaning heavily towards metal sound. This album brings a lot of memories of the times when a lot of hardcore bands started incorporating death metal influences into their sound, but it was long before the deathcore plague and it still sounded legit.
That’s the deal with Parasitic Skies – their sound is down-tuned, heavy as fuck, with groovy riffing and deep, growling-like vocals but there are no silly pig squeals and no tempo changes every 15 seconds. The drumming is intense and on point, but thanks God there are no blast beats. Parasitic Skies knows what they’re good at and gets down to business without trying to get fancy. The songwriting on this album has a gritty yet sharp energy. That means the thin line between being cool metallic hardcore band and being lame death metal wannabes has not been crossed. And good, cause it sounds merciless and uncompromising enough without that fake shit. And while the regular songs never let down when it comes to intensity, the instrumental tracks make use of some sludgy, dissonant riffing which adds more depth to the album. When it comes to lyrics, their approach is far from being straight forward. The overall tone is pretty dark and apocalyptical at times but you gotta dig deeper into what they’re saying to figure out the meaning. This aspect is very similar to now classic H8000 bands like Liar and Congress which also used images of warfare and demons to get their straight edge and political message out.
The Descent is a good album – if you want to hear the solid metallic hardcore but you’re fed up with the current state of the genre, it will give you the experience that you are looking for.
Review by Dloogi
Label: Seventh Dagger Records
Year: 2010
Band's website
