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Review: 'Martyr Defiled'
'Young Gods'   

-  Album: 'Young Gods'
-  Genre: 'Heavy Metal' -  Release Date: '21st April 2017'

Our Rating:
Lincoln isn’t exactly renowned for its music scene. In fact, I’ve often had to explain where Lincoln is, despite the fact the city is the county town of England’s largest county. Time was, before the university was built, anyone from Lincoln with any kind of ambition wanted to move to Nottingham. Given Nottingham’s vast metal scene, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that with ‘Young Gods’ by Lincoln quintet Martyr Defiled, we’re well into heavy-duty, snarling, chugging, attacking contemporary metal territory here.

The blurb recounts that the album was ‘written and recorded over the past three years by Ryan and Matt in their respective bedrooms’ and explains how the original intention was to release two separate mini albums, but that this was later changed in favour of a single document of assault of brutality, a work of what the band describe as an album of ‘technical modern metalcore and monolithic hooks.’

It’s certainly brutal, and beneath the savage, dense wall of churning noise, there’s definitely a keenly technical element. He compositions are complex, intelligent and, at times, utterly bewildering, while the focus of the overall sound and production is attack. This dos mean that the hooks aren’t always particularly obvious, but I’d challenge anyone to arrive at this album in search of a good old singalong. No, ‘Young Gods’ is an album one listens to for the catharsis, not the melody. And the catharis, it delivers to the max.

‘At the Throne of Salem’ lurches instantaneously between full-throttle riffage and stuttering breaks via some whiplash tempo changes and skull-cracking noise. ‘Through Famine, War & Scorn’ is absolutely brutal: the cold, thunderous low-tempo assault of early Swans (which does make me wonder if the album’s title is entirely coincidental) is paired with the most savage vocal attack; but then the juddering stop/start riff of ‘Sow, and You Shall Reap’ is equally crushing in its weight and violent force.

There’s no let up, and with twelve tracks of equally punishing fury crushed back to back, ‘Young Gods’ is a draining, soul-hammering experience.




  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Martyr Defiled - Young Gods