By Jonny Bakes
I was having a glance through the list of album submissions the other day when a particular description caught my eye. “Imagine someone put a Rottweiler in a washing machine” it said, and my first reaction was “who the fuck even thinks about these things?” shortly followed by a second thought of “I wonder what that does sound like…” There was only one thing for it, I’d better buckle up and check out the latest release from Danish metallians Cabal to alleviate my curiosity.
The description went on to say “do not put this on if you’re feeling lovely, it’s not lovely music.” Well it’s a good thing I’ve spent the last two weeks locked in the house with nothing but a Geordie bloke for company, I’m feeling pretty far from lovely!
As soon as the album kicks off, I can immediately see where they were coming from with that initial description. It’s pretty aggressive and brutal, that’s for sure, but I think the best way to describe it is with a little story that I just made up on the spot. Imagine, if you will, the lads from Cabal being all young and impressionable. They pick up a copy of Iowa and immediately dig the vibes and think to themselves “this is good, but it needs to be at least ten times as heavy, one day we’re going to do that”, then fast forward to 2020 and ‘Drag Me Down’ is conceived. Although it’s not there in every track, I do detect a pretty strong influence from the early Slipknot days, but then added to this is some incredibly chunky riffs, and drums that hit harder than Connor McGregor in a bar fight. If that doesn’t make it heavy enough, there’s a healthy dose of heavy breakdown and some impressive guest appearances which includes Trivium’s Matt Heafy to name one.
So, like I said, the album holds no punches and launches straight into ‘Gift Givers’ which after a pretty brutal introduction starts to sound like a seriously beefed up Slipknot. You know, like Corey and the gang took a shit load of steroids, ditched the dude with the beer keg and took themselves down a really heavy path. Things start to get even heavier as the album progresses though, leaving that Slipknot vibe behind at times and adopting a brutal, yet groovy, death metal stance. ‘It Haunts Me’ takes an even heavier direction with the appearance of Kim Song Sternkopf (Møl), bringing a seriously sinister edge to the vocals here.
Perhaps the biggest guest artist on this album has to be Trivium’s Matt Heafy who takes on additional vocal duties to support Andreas Paarup on ‘Bitter Friend’ which also sees the introduction of just a hint of synth to start things off. The two vocalists seem to be in a real competitive battle throughout the track to show who can have the most brutal vocals. Forget rap battles, this is where it’s at!
‘Drag Me Down’ is definitely a worthy investment for fans of Thy Art is Murder, Suicide Silence, and like there music to have some serious guts to it but keeping a bit of groove in there for good measure. I’m certainly glad that I made the decision to find out what a Rottweiler in a washing machine sounds like, and it turns out that it’s right up my street. Don’t worry though, no dogs were harmed during the writing of this review.
- ‘Drag Me Down’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
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