Stillborn

Los Asesinos Del Sur

Ataman Productions 2011

Poland's resident blackened death metallers Stillborn spew forth their fourth full-length album.  The album is intense and tight death metal with blackened influences that bark at you like a battlefield's worth of machine gun nests, hot led cutting through your flesh!  Chugging Morbid Angel-isms are swept under by a barrage of blasting black metal riffs and rapid drums on Hymn Of Destruction.  The song quickly reverts to its muscular Floridian death metal rhythms.  Antonym crunches and grinds along, alternating between all out speedy aggression and brooding midtempo rhythms.  Son of the Holy Motherfucker begins with a riff that borders on being catchy.  The vocals are a little throatier during this song but remain just as deadly.  All the meanwhile the track exhibits a certain ebb and flow with riffs that surge and then drag.  A martial snare ushers in Blood and Dust and then some technical harmonics announce some decidedly powerful riffs that just reek of Domination era Morbid Angel.  Then all hell breaks loose at the 2:36 mark as a flurry of drums and riffs scorch my ears.  Sometimes I feel the Morbid Angel rfgerences are maybe a little too strong, the title track being an example of this.  However the razor sharp intensity and execution of a track like Stillborn II more than compensates for this.  It's frenzied riffs and time changes stab at you before the slow passages attempt to bludgeon your brain to a bloody mess.  Los Asesino Del Sur is nothing too original but the album's precision songwriting and execution and its serious conviction take it far.  Stillborn's approach is tight and concentrates on deadly riffing and spot-on drumming and reminds me a lot at times of Angelcorpse and Spearhead.  If this style evokes Satanic might for you, then Stillborn will have you banging with totalitarian glee.