No intro. No fucking mercy. ‘Once Alive Always Dead’ kicks the coffin lid straight off and drags you down into a pure old-school Death Metal journey! This is Open the Coffin’s second full-length album and I have to be honest, I hadn’t heard of these Brazilians before I stumbled across them on Bandcamp.
Musically, this is worship at the altar of the HM2 pedal. The guitars are thick, meaty, and rotten, with plenty of mid-paced crushing riffs. These riffs feel as if they are straight from the unhallowed grave; they repeat, grind, and mutate until they are burned into one’s skull.
The drums are fat and pounding, with no over-the-top fills, while the bass rumbles along low and dirty. The vocals, spewed out by Claudio Slayer (what a name!), are guttural and sound as though they had been rotting in the coffin long before the microphone was even turned on. ‘Once Alive Always Dead’ doesn’t try to reinvent Death Metal; instead, it reminds you why the genre is so deadly and bloody good in the first place. This is filthy, honest old-school Death Metal for grave worshippers only.
Go ahead, open the coffin…I dare you!
