Mutilation Rites are a fairly unknown quantity, forming in Brooklyn, New York in 2009 the only things that can be learnt come straight from the music itself.

With a sound reminiscent of Darkthrone, both past and present sound it has a created its own little bubble of sonic textures somewhere inside the rifts between Crust Punk and Black Metal.

The EP opens strongly with Goliath, an intense blast beat of an opening with dark down trodden guitar tones tremoloing above it. The drums throughout the track switch between blast beats and a heavily slowed down Punky beat. The vocals are heavily buried inside the sound of the whole track, whilst the rest of the instrumentation manages to sit quite thickly the vocals seem fairly weak in comparison to the overall tone of music.

Pariah opens slowly with guitar intro with quite simply an evil spooky sounding guitar rift, before suddenly crashing head first into more blast beats. As like in the last track, the vocals are buried within the instrumentation for the most part, however when they are allowed to stand out more in the slowed down/doomy sections, the full impact of the strangled tortured feel of the vocals really adds to the music. This track has overall the most interesting music to it, with many different sections making it up and there are some variations in the vocals too.

White Death comes in with an almost Hardcore style sensibility to openings, however differentiating itself quickly with very depressive feel guitar riffs. With sections breaking back into a more gritty, dark angry feel of more along the lines of something Crust influenced. Switching between the depressive Black Metal parts and the more crusty influenced angry parts sounds a bit schizophrenic over anything.

Finishing up with Negative Space, with some brilliantly melodically driven riffs over D-beats and the occasional blast beat section.  With some more slower sections with plenty of evil sounding chugged riffs and gets the heaviest feeling this EP gets.

Overall this EP isn’t bad, it just lacks really pushing itself out of the Black Metal style playing, there’s bits where it embraces parts of heavier styles of playing but the music never particularly gets heavier making it just come across a bit weak, especially the vocals.

From a band wanting to sound gritty and tortured you’d expect more power to the performance of it all. The bits of this that are good sound really good, but it is just let down by ideas feeling just not fully being fleshed out.

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listen to the b-side of this record online here.

buy the record here.