Arsis – Starve For the Devil (2010) [Nuclear Blast] // Grade: B+

If you’ve ever met me, you’ll know I have a pretty shitty habit of forming extremely strong opinions for no particular reason about things that I’ve never really come in contact with or paid attention to. For example, I was pretty sure that the Murder City Devils and the River City Rebels were pretty much the same damn band for probably close to a decade. Then I actually listened to MCD and had to devour my shit covered words.

Some of you may also know that I formerly worked for and was unceremoniously fired by Sirius Satellite Radio as a music coordinator (and outlaw country DJ for about 3 shows… that ruled).  During this relationship I pretty much learned the hard way, that most corporate radio, even the kind that doesn’t have commercials and can play shit with cursing all the fucking time and is supposedly “against mainstream and has hosts like Howard Stern and shit” bows to basically what the industry wants. Fortunately, the dudes running metal channel there (formerly called Hard Attack) were a bunch of died in the wool heshers with their heads on right and generally (you know, how specific assholes like me can be…) good taste in jams. Unfortunately, apparently their main clientele was a lot of douchebag nümetalers from Kansas and thus the music reflected this (think lots of Godsmack).

Coming into this review, I was totally fucking bummed because I had distinct memories of Sirius playing a shit ton of Arsis a couple of years ago and I remember thinking it slobbed a fucking knob at the time. What I remember was a techy uber-modern death metal band doing nothing interesting or good.

Eating your words doesn’t always suck, at least when it comes to Arsis being a lot better than I remember. This album is definitely a listenable chunk of modern thrash/death with a ton of throwbacks to bands like Slayer, At the Gates/other melodic Gothenbergers, and even some Death jams. It’s definitely still fast, highly technical, progressive shit (progressive tends to be an insult in my musical world…) but they make sure to keep it catchy, moving and even fun.  I was definitely surprised to find myself comparing licks/feel to bands like Skeletonwitch and grinning like shit at some of the Twin Guitar-monies.  Fuck man, on some of their jams they even throw in some straight up NWOBHM riffs, and as you know, NWOBHM is possibly the fastest way to any hesher’s heart.

I’d say overall, I probably won’t listen to this shit every single day or even every week but I definitely put this album down as a well composed, well executed album by some insanely good musicians with strong anchor in songwriting in the context of an album (as opposed to just playing blastbeats for 45mins and calling it a day). It stays lively, it’s got totally upfront roots in a bunch of types of classic metal as well as a stylistic look to the future.

Arsis, yer all right by me fuckers.

- Jack Crank