UK underground champs Dead Beyond Buried are giving their new album, The Dark Era, and that’s pretty cool, right?
Everyone likes free stuff. That’s a given. And especially free music. Eight out 10 features with bands at some point touch upon the music industry’s perilous position right over yon great fiscal abyss, into which it’s sure to fall if it collectively fails to find a new business model. And of course it’s all because of illegal downloading … BLAH BLAH BLAH. Like, Godwin’s law now comes with supplementary clauses arguing how Illegal downloading/”the fucked music business” is to music journalism what Hitler/the Nazis are to Internet debating. Whatever. We’ve had the Internet and mp3s for yonks now, pretty much nothing has changed and, shit, the pro/anti- downloading debate was never ever going to be an edge of the seat affair. And debate has never inspired anyone to stagedive off a monitor.
English death metal band Dead Beyond Buried have, though, and they want to take the debate right out of the picture (they’d never use a phrase like “right out of the picture”; they’re more down with eviscerating, brutalizing, etc.) The only way you’ll get your hands on their third album, The Dark Era, is to download it, and they’d get really angry if you paid for it because this whole thing is supposed to be free.
QUOTE/UNQUOTE from the band: “We just feel that we want as many people as humanly possible to hear the material, in this day and age there’s no real money in cd sales and illegal downloading happens regardless so we thought fuck it let’s give it away and hope people appreciate that fact buy the t-shirt or come see us play instead”.
Go download their album at this location right here.
You might not have heard of Dead Beyond Buried so here’s their whole deal in brief: Formed in ’98, they came shredding straight out of the non-descript overfill of east London’s extremities, Essex/Romford. They’re influenced by all that malevolent Florida death metal; debut LP Condemned to Misery had plenty of Morbid Angel and Deicide going on, with elements of Suffocation’s bruise slamming around in there, too. And for a while, like ‘round about 2010 when their second album Inheritors of Hell dropped, they got kinda sold on adding about of Behemoth’s black metal edge to the riffs. They’ve shared stages with the likes of Decapitated, Dark Funeral, Obituary, etc.
But this new one is what they’re really all about. From the outside it’s like they’ve gone for latter period Morbid Angel (e.g. Formulas… not Illud, dude) with an ear for the DM epic a la Vital Remains, and atonal darkness, the likes of Demigod once dealt in …
Well, come to think of it it feels a bit weird referencing Vital Remains as a core influence as they don’t crop up that often, but for Dead Beyond Buried it’s kinda apt. Bassist Simon Lee always wears Vital Remains shorts on stage, it’s in his contract, and the first time I ever saw them cutting around they were at a Benton-free Vital Remains show and using the word “brutal” as a verb, and “beef” as an adjective.
Dead Beyond Buried cut the The Dark Era at Hertz Studio in Poland, with Weislawscy Brothers (Vader, Behemoth) in charge of mixing/mastering.
Here is their video for new track “Cold Black Stars”
https://youtu.be/V_QQqz56WEQ
And if you live in central Europe, they’re currently on the Serpent Sermon tour through Europe with Marduk and Immolation.
