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Coffins: Mortuary in darkness
21/12/09 || Khlysty
Delicate as a wrecking-ball. Musically inclined as a group of berserkers. Technically advanced as a mace and equally destructive. With all the tenderness of a clusterfuck. That’s Coffins in a nutshell and if you have any objection about their unfuckwithability, you can kindly fuck off right away. This is not music for nitpicking, for semantic analysis and for detailed categorization and academic correlation. This is definitely not for wimps, or for friends of hyper-tech instrumental prowess. This shit comes, rapes, pillages, obliterates and goes like that. And, you wanna know something? This is as it should be. Enough with dainty production jobs and guitar-stratification and clarity and technicality and all this –wonderful, but, at the end of the day, superfluous- shit; this fucker’s all about brute force. Question is, can you handle it?
When I started writing for GD, I had the pleasure of sharing a double bill with my main hate-you-all-you-fuckers-hope-you-die man, Kampfar, reviewing Coffins latest offering, the wonderfully deranged “Buried Death”. This time around, I’m gonna take you back to 2005, when those crazed Japs started polluting the world with their death/doom toxic ooze of their first record “Mortuary In Darkness”. This is it, folks, ground zero: birthtime of one of the loudest, dirtiest, most ravaging sounds ever to abuse these ears. See, Coffins take their cues from the Elder Gods of doom/death (i.e. Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Hellhammer, early Obituary et al), super-amp them to all Hell, add an almost-punkish vibe with their this-is-gonna-hurt-and-we-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck attitude and, VOILA!!! A great platter of Paleolithic doom/death, with enough gentrification to let you know that the three fuckers creating this unholy noise are TOTALLY here and now.
The seven songs comprising this biohazard move from sluggish to marginally fast, but the fact of the matter is that Coffins don’t seem to give a fuck about details such as time-signature fuckery or displays of technical pyrotechnics. Nah, their sound is uniformly ugly, a bilious and insidious mix of lowest-of-low-end guitar and bass, narcoleptic drumming and a death growl that puts to shame 99,9% of the competition, as its sounds more like a dragon throwing up his guts than anything even approaching human vocals. The subject matter of the songs is pretty clear from their titles and, whaddya know, it’s NOT about the joys of life. As for the lyrics –I still don’t know if Uchino sings in English, Japanese, Russian of Swedish, or all of them at the same time. If anyone can discern anything from his clogged-toilet burps, please inform me, ‘kay?
The copy of the record that I have sports a hot 2008 mastering job by Scott “Pig Destroyer/ANb” Hull and the sound is definitely HUUUUUUGE. The production is pretty ace, too, as it combines a very modern feel with a stone-age vibe that’s really great. Each and every song here is (head)bangworthy and if the two bonus live cuts tucked at the ass-end of the record are indicative of what happens during a Coffins show, well, fuck, where can I see them, like, NOW? Of course, the recording quality of those two tracks is shit, to say the least, but shitty quality and all, one cannot but admire the energetic and powerful performance of the band.
So, bottom line is, this is cool shit. It’s not a reinvention of doom/death but as an addition to the annals of a great subgenre, it holds its own with power, determination and conviction. So, go, buy and die, mofos!
P.S.: Tasteful and graphically perfect cover, doncha think?…
- Information
- Released: 2005
- Label: Razorback Records (2009 Enucleation Records)
- Website: www.coffins.jp
- Band
- Uchino: vocals, guitar
- Sentou: bass
- You: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Black End
- 02. Slaughter of gods
- 03. Mortuary in darkness
- 04. The unspeakable pain
- 05. Sacrifice to evil spirit
- 06. Torture
- 07. Into the coffin (Oppression)
- 08. Sacrifice to evil spirit (live bonus track)
- 09. Torture (live bonus track)
