Grave Miasma – Exalted Emanation (Sepulchral Voice, 2009)

I for one couldn’t be happier about real death metal’s return to prominence within the underground. By “real” death metal, I mean death metal that is truly evil and morbid sounding, death metal that adheres to the raw, vile groundwork laid down by the genre’s originators, none of that studio-slick bullshit that the big metal labels have been forcing down our throats since the dawn of pro-tools. Don’t get me wrong, that stuff has a time and a place, but I will take a gnarly, organic and rough-around-the-edges sounding recording any day over whatever “brutal band of the week” the industry at large happens to be pumping out. I swear that somewhere must be a secret factory that pumps out deathcore and tech death bands like fucking widgets. Being that the market is currently so oversaturated with sterile tech-death and the like, many ‘heads out there might not even be aware that there is an alternative. Luckily, oldschool death metal is starting to garner more attention, and hopefully more fans will be introduced to some quality dark and heavy music as a result.