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Asphyx' 'The Rack' turns 20

I’m not a sentimental type, but when I listen to Asphyx’ The Rack, which turns 20 today, I get incredibly sad. The record itself makes me incredibly happy. It’s raw and pure death metal, with Martin van Drunen on vocals. The tones are shredding, so is the voice, and each song is more tortured than the last. What more does one need?

(Actually, I could use sturdier drumming, but that’s a small quibble.)

With a recently rejuvenated Asphyx and the new-ish Hail of Bullets, van Drunen has achieved a timeless quality. But The Rack takes me back in time. I didn’t even hear it when it came out; that didn’t happen until the 21st century. But it is unmistakably of its time. Consider other death metal records that came out in 1991: Like an Ever Flowing Stream, Mental Funeral, Effigy of the Forgotten, Dawn of Possession, Into the Grave, Necroticism, and Soulside Journey, to name a few. Death metal has since gone through many twists and turns, and I’ve found much to enjoy in each one – even deathcore. But 1991 was probably death metal’s peak in terms of vitality. Its mother lode of brutality was so bounteous that it couldn’t help but disgorge classic after classic.

That’s rose-colored hindsight, anyway. Metal-archives.com says that 105 death metal albums came out in 1991. Like now, and like always, most were probably dreck. We just remember the good ones. But it’s sobering to think of a peak in purity, since everything afterwards chases that shadow. Now many (too many, actually) death metal bands invoke the spirit of ’91. Their hearts are in the right place – raw is good, evil is good – but they’re not of the right place. They’re of now. They pretend like 20 years of metal never happened. So they miss the lessons of those 20 years. Thus, they place themselves in competition with the class of ’91 – and they will lose. I love Lenny Kravitz, but between him and Led Zeppelin, there’s no contest.

Thankfully we have an invention by Thomas Edison called recorded music. We can listen to The Rack in the present. We can learn from it and have better futures. Its lessons aren’t esoteric. Be raw, be aggressive, be skilled. Prize what’s pure. Death metal should sound like death. More precisely, it should sound like a matter of life and death. But it itself is not dead. The Rack is bloody good proof.

— Cosmo Lee

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HEAR THE RACK

– Full album stream –

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BUY THE RACK

Amazon (MP3)
Amazon (CD)

Relapse (CD)

CM Distro (CD)

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